Business Model Generation with Alexander Osterwalder

In the early October in our “Advice on business literature from Helen Edwards”  we suggested you to read the book “Business model generation” written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.

And in the middle of the month Alexander Osterwalder came to SKOLKOVO to personally share the secrets of constructing a variety of business models with the first intake of SKOLKVO MBA students. The students have just got down to the final module – building up their own start-up projects.

Alex Osterwalder’s concept of business models is simple and clear and it is always based on the visualization. He especially emphasizes the importance of Design Thinking as a new trend in modern business education. Alex says:

“In business we trained to decide between different options – A, B, C. But that’s the past. The future requires people to be innovative and creative. So it’s not just to be able to decide between A, B and C, they must have the ability to create alternatives, new possibilities, that’s what really important. So you need to educate business students to do that. And business schools are not very well equipped to do that. So typically what do they do? They look into design methods – how do designers work, how do architectures work… They try to teach those methods to business students to create new strategies, new business models, new services”

We will post the full interview with Alex Osterwalder soon. In the meantime, you can read students’ impressions from the workshop.

Alexandr Khomenko:
"I can illustrate the effect from Alex Osterwalder course with a simple example. When I presented my start-up for the first time, they told me "There is something in it, but the idea is unclear".In my next presentation I used one of Alex's models, and then the entire council of experts understood the idea of the project and told me that the project had good chances for success!"


Thirugnanam Mudaliar:
"When people are struggling to give correct definition of what is business model is, Alex Osterwalder course not only helped us to deeply understand the concept but also provided us with tools to develop and evaluate different business model from the same idea to maximize the value from any business idea! Surely, this is one of the mega valuable session that we got from SKOLKOVO"

By the way, you can find a lot of interesting concepts created by Alex Osterwalder on his page on slideshare.