Alexander Osterwalder

The Business Model Canvas, a single sheet ruled into nine boxes, began life inside Alexander Osterwalder's doctoral thesis, completed at Lausanne in 2004 under Yves Pigneur. The two then wrote Business Model Generation together and put it out themselves in 2009, drawing on 470 practitioners from 45 countries who paid to take part; Wiley published it the following year. Osterwalder, born 1974 in St. Gallen, co-founded the consultancy and software firm Strategyzer in 2010, and the books work as the door into what that company sells in training, licences and tools. The Invincible Company, written with Pigneur, Alan Smith and Frederic Etiemble and published in 2020, widens the method from a single business model to running a whole portfolio of them, established and untested side by side.