Where Business Model Innovation Really Came From: Rereading My 2001 Dissertation After 25 Years

For more than a million readers, this blog has been about one theme: business model innovation. Not as a buzzword, but as a discipline with two faces – the business model as an instrument of analysis, a way to understand precisely how a company creates, delivers, and captures value; and the business model as an instrument of imagination, a way to imagine configurations that do not yet exist and then shape them into being.

What most readers never saw is where that theme came from. It came from a doctoral dissertation I submitted at the University of St. Gallen in 2001 – Geschäftsmodelle in der digitalen Ökonomie – a piece of work that introduced the business model as a formal unit of analysis before the field of business model innovation existed. This summer I did something I had not done in a quarter of a century: I read it again, cover to cover, as if someone else had written it. I expected to wince. Instead I found it more alive than I remembered, a set of ideas that had aged into their moment rather than out of it. So I am now writing a long essay about what I found – and I want to tell you why, and invite you to be among the first to read it. Part of it is the history of the term itself: where it really came from, which ideas it rests on, and how it travelled from a dissertation into a field.

The theme you know has a root you probably don’t

This blog is read widely. The dissertation underneath it is read by almost no one, particularly since it was written in German. That is not a complaint – it is how ideas travel. What is easy to apply spreads; what demands thought waits.

But the waiting has a cost. The theme travelled – into entrepreneurship, into teaching, eventually onto a canvas on a wall – while the deeper claim stayed behind, still largely unadopted twenty-five years on. Most people who work with business model innovation never encounter it: that this is not a technique for filling in boxes. It is a type of strategy in its own right – the strategic answer to disruptive technologies. When a technology overturns the rules of value creation, as the internet did then and AI does now, the winning response is never a better product or a leaner process. It is a redesigned business model. That claim, and the research beneath it, remains underused relative to what it can do – and the gap matters more now than it did in 2001.

Business Model: A unit of analysis – and, less known, a unit of design for the future

The essay makes explicit what the dissertation already did, but could not yet name. The word for it did not exist in strategy in 2001. What the dissertation built – not described from the outside, but built into its foundations – is a generative strategy: a way of doing strategy that does not select a position in a market that already exists, but analyses what a new technology structurally makes possible, anchors that analysis in what people genuinely need, and from there designs configurations of value creation that did not exist before.

This is the movement at the heart of the work – the business model as a unit of analysis and, by design, a unit of design. The first is the side most people know: the business model as a lens, a way to take an existing company apart and see how it works. The second is the side few ever reach: the business model as something you draw before it exists, an object built to be designed with. From the beginning, the dissertation treated it as both – the two were never separate in it.

That is why it matters as a unit of analysis in the first place: it is the object at which imagination can do rigorous work. You can hold it in your mind, change one component, and reason precisely about what must change in the others. Schumpeter saw the generative core of this in 1912. Hamel and Prahalad made it a strategic posture. What the dissertation added was the object – and, alongside it, a media model describing digital media not as electronic data processing but as an Infosphere: a space inhabited by human and machine agents alike.

That second framework, written in 2001, turns out to describe the structural foundation of what we now call agentic AI. I did not predict it. The model held the seed, not the harvest. But it is why the essay does not read as a retrospective.

The defining tasks of this century – the climate transition, global health, the integration of AI – will not be solved by the configurations that produced them. They are not failures of technology. The technology exists. What is missing is the configuration. And business model innovation is not one option among several for meeting them. It is the form that transformation takes.

The essay: Be among the first to read it

The essay will be a long read – a genuine reckoning with what held up over twenty-five years, what did not, and why it matters now more than when it was written. It will be the most complete statement I have made of where this body of work comes from and where I think it is going.

If you have ever used anything from this blog, this is the argument beneath it.

And the dissertation itself is not locked away. It is public, and still readable, exactly as it was written in 2001. I have always believed ideas are meant to travel – to be taken up, argued with, built upon. Everything the essay draws out is already in that text, waiting for anyone curious enough to go to the source. Twenty-five years is a good moment to do it.

I am sending the essay to my newsletter subscribers first, the moment it is ready. And it is only the beginning. Over the coming months I am writing a series on what the dissertation opened up: generative strategy as a discipline you can learn, not a talent you are born with; agentic AI and the Infosphere it inhabits; and the century’s harder problems – climate, health, the integration of AI – read not as technology failures but as configurations no one has designed yet.

Leave your email below, connect via Linkedin or write me an Email to essay@fluidminds.ch and you receive all of it, in order, as it is ready. No noise, no selling. Just the thinking.

Understand. Imagine bigger. Act.