Book Review - Business Model Generation

Book Title: Business Model Generation
ISBN: 0470876417
Author: Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

Review
The book, written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, co-created by 470 practitioners, is an innovating book in its content and its design that totally contrasts with the business litterature books.
The book presents a business model framework called the Canvas, based on nine building blocks that describe the business model as a complete model with its interfaces and inteconnections with each others:

1. Customer Value Proposition
2. Sales Channels
3. Sales Relationships
4. Customer Segments
5. Revenue Streams
6. Key Resources
7. Key Activities
8. Key Partners
9. Cost Structure

The business model canvas describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. It has created a shared language for describing, visualizing, and assessing business models.

The book contains a list of popular business model patterns including concepts from popular management litterature such as Unbundling Business Models, The Long Tail, Multi-Sided Platforms, FREE as a Business Model and Open Business Models.

The book contains also an exhaustive and interesting chapter on Business model design, using concepts such as customer insights, ideation, visual thinking, prototyping, storytelling and scenarios.
An attempt is done to corellate business model design using the canvas and blue ocean strategy, taking as an example the famous blue ocean strategy example of le cirque du soleil.

Design process
A long chapter is dedicated to Business model design process, which includes a 5 step process:
(see my detailed post)

1. Mobilize
2. Understand
3. Design
4. Implement
5. Manage

Visual thinking
The book focuses also a lot on the visual thinking, the analogies to architecture (Guggenheim museum) and design, using concepts such as ideation, prototyping and storytelling. Designing a business model should be a team work and the best way to do it, is to print out the canvas on a large surface, plot it on a wall and let people jointly sketch out or use post-it notes to discuss and analyze business models.

Interesting cases
The book contains many interesting cases from companies such as Lulu.com Lego, Google, Nintendo Wii, Apple, Skype, Rega, Gillette, Procter & Gamble, and Innocentive. It uses the business model canvas to explain the rationale of each company's business model.

Conclusion
It's a very good boek. Easy to read. Visual. Useful for practitioners and novices in business model development.
The Canvas and the methodology explained are powerful, visual tools for success.