Alex Osterwalder

Why organisations work with Alex Osterwalder

• The Business Model Canvas is used by millions of practitioners across industries. When Osterwalder presents it, he brings the doctoral research that produced it – giving leadership teams not just a tool but the underlying architecture for why it works and how to apply it to their specific strategic situation.
• The Value Proposition Canvas addresses a precise and expensive commercial failure: the gap between what organisations build and what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product teams, this is the difference between offerings that generate revenue and those that absorb it.
• Strategyzer’s live programmes span three distinct commercial challenges – business model strategy, value proposition design, and innovation governance – through a single interconnected system. Leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions can work with the same shared language rather than operating on separate frameworks.
• The Invincible Company framework gives executive teams a structural answer to the portfolio question: how to manage existing revenue-generating business models while simultaneously building new growth engines, with separate governance and metrics for each.
• Consistent top-10 placement across five consecutive Thinkers50 global rankings (2015-2025), with two Thinkers50 Strategy Awards, provides independent verification of Osterwalder’s standing – outside bureau self-attribution.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO of Strategyzer; co-founded 2010 following the publication of Business Model Generation
• Co-creator, with Yves Pigneur and Alan Smith, of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map
• Business Model Generation (2010): international bestseller, more than 5 million copies sold, translated into nearly 40 languages
• Consistently ranked in the Thinkers50 global top 10 across five biennial rankings (2015-2025); two-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award recipient
• Visiting Professor, IMD; co-directs the Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan
• Contributor to Harvard Business Review; PhD, HEC Lausanne – doctoral thesis on business model ontology; recipient of the EU’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award (2013)

Biography

Alex Osterwalder’s doctoral thesis at HEC Lausanne, completed in 2004, proposed a formal architecture for how value is created, delivered, and captured in any business. That thesis became the Business Model Canvas. Co-developed with Yves Pigneur, it is now in use across millions of teams at organisations including Microsoft, Nestlé, Mastercard, and Merck.

The Value Proposition Canvas extended that system into one of the most consistently expensive failures in commercial strategy: building products and propositions without a clear picture of what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product leaders, this is an operational problem. Strategyzer’s programmes on value proposition design, sales and marketing alignment, and customer understanding apply the same structured, testable approach to go-to-market challenges that the Canvas brought to strategy.

The Invincible Company, co-authored with Pigneur, Smith, and Frederic Etiemble, addressed the portfolio dimension. Large organisations fail not from lack of innovation intent but from having no structural mechanism to run exploration and exploitation in parallel. The book provides that mechanism: separate governance, separate metrics, and a distinct decision logic for the existing business and the growth bets being built alongside it.

Osterwalder is founder and CEO of Strategyzer, a Visiting Professor at IMD, and a Thinkers50 top-10 thinker across five consecutive rankings from 2015 to 2025. Whether the challenge is growth strategy, value proposition design, or innovation governance, a leadership team, a marketing function, and an innovation unit in the same organisation can each engage with the same interconnected system.

Key speaking topics

• Business model design and competitive strategy
• Value proposition design and customer fit
• Go-to-market strategy and offering management
• Sales, marketing, and product alignment
• Innovation portfolio management
• Customer discovery and assumption testing
• Competing on business model advantage

Ideal for

• CEOs and executive leadership teams working on growth strategy and business model resilience
• Chief Marketing Officers and commercial leaders in B2B organisations designing and testing value propositions
• Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development managing business model portfolios
• Innovation leaders and transformation directors responsible for testing and scaling new growth engines

Audience outcomes

• A working understanding of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Portfolio Map, and how to apply each to live strategic and commercial challenges
• A shared language across leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions for discussing business model design and value proposition fit
• Practical methods for testing assumptions about customer needs and market demand before committing significant resource
• A structural framework for running exploration and exploitation in parallel, with the governance logic each requires
• Clearer diagnostic tools for identifying where value propositions are failing to match real customer needs, and what to do about it