I am a strategy consultant with my own company fluidminds, a small and independent think tank in Switzerland. The ideas in this blog date back to my times at the investment bank Lazard Freres and later at my Ph.D. studies at the University of St. Gallen in the late 1990s.
I always tried to understand the economics of a business.

What were the economic drivers of a business? What made this business more successful than another business? What truly differentiated a successfully business from just a normal business? How did some companies create more value than others? How can firms escape the endless game of getting better but never exceeding their competitors?

During my times at the University of St. Gallen, I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on “Business models in the digital economy“. The work (published in 2001) became quite popular in the German speaking countries since I tried to explain the new economic factors that made up the digital economy and basically of all businesses that have a high degree of digital assets.

In my work I coined the term business model innovation which later became very popular. At that time I also obtained the domain business-model-innovation.com which I used for 8 years just to present some definitions of terms I defined in the dissertation.

In 2002 I wrote the following paper on business models and strategy. The paper was for a workshop Alex Osterwalder organized as a fresh Ph.D. student at the University of Lausanne also in Switzerland. The paper is in parts a translation of one chapter of my Ph.D. thesis of 2001.

Due to the high popularity of the book and also of my website www.business-model-innovation.com I have decided to start this blog. The idea is to advance the discussion of business model innovation.

Besides my work at fluidminds, I am also managing director of the Swiss subsidiary of the internet startup experteer.ch and lecturer at several universities like Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany or at HWZ Zürich.