I’m Dr. oec. Patrick Stähler, and this is where I’ve been writing about business models for years — not as a buzzword, but as a way of seeing.

My conviction, in one sentence: the great challenges of our time — AI, climate, demographic change, structural disruption — are not technology problems. They are business model problems. The technology usually already exists. What’s missing is the new configuration of how value is created, delivered, and captured. And no business model works without the people who build it. The human being is at the centre of every innovation — as the customer, and as the team.

What I contributed to research on business models and business model innovation

In my doctoral dissertation at the University of St. Gallen (2001), I was among the first to establish the business model as a distinct unit of strategic analysis — a lens through which to understand a company that sits beside the older units of strategic management: the product, the industry, the firm. Richard Bettis had argued that those existing frameworks were “largely out of touch with the evolution of modern competition.” The dissertation was an attempt to grind a new lens — and then to use it not only to understand the present, but to design the future.

This matters to me for a specific reason. I did not set out to build a tool. I set out to understand the formal structures beneath the digital economy — what endures across technologies and decades, rather than what describes one moment. The result was concept knowledge rather than tool knowledge: tool knowledge expires when the instrument is replaced; concept knowledge remains valid across contexts. That is why a dissertation written in 2001 still describes, with some precision, the logic of today’s networked, agentic AI systems — they were already implied by the model, a quarter-century before they became everyday reality.

Building on that unit of analysis, I described the strategic discipline that is now called business model innovation. This work predates the now-famous Business Model Canvas and the broader wave of business model tools it inspired. I name this not to claim a tool, but to be precise about where the thinking began.

The four-element framework

My book Das Richtige gründen distils all the works starting from my Ph.D., my further work on business models here on the blog and my research this into a framework of four interdependent elements: the value proposition (the benefit you promise a real human), the value-creation architecture (how you actually deliver it), the revenue model (how the economics work), and the Unternehmensgeist — the spirit of the company, its team and its values. The decisive idea is interdependence: durable competitive advantage doesn’t come from any single element, but from how all four lock together into a coherent whole. A competitor can copy your product. Copying the fit is nearly impossible.

What I do

I’m the founder of fluidminds, a strategy consultancy focused on business model and disruptive innovation. I’m not a specialist in any one industry — I work on the process by which companies discover innovative business models themselves, whether they’re incumbents who need to rethink, or start-ups who need to find a model at all. I also teach at several universities, including the University of St. Gallen and the Bern University of Applied Sciences.

On this blog, I take real cases — companies, industries, field reports — and think them through with this framework, as a tool for structuring challenges and thinking bigger. If that’s useful to you, you’re in the right place.

Everyone talks about AI now. I was modelling its logic in 2001.

Here’s something I find quietly amusing. When I wrote my dissertation, business models were the part I found almost boring. What fascinated me was something else entirely: the question of what makes digital media or digital technology how we call it today fundamentally different from everything before it.

The answer I worked out, building on Beat Schmid’s theory of the Infosphere, was that a digital information carrier is not passive — it is itself an agent. Before the computer, the only active agent processing information was the human being. The computer became the first artificial active agent. And the dissertation was explicit about what follows: a medium that doesn’t merely respond to a human, but takes the initiative itself and acts. I called it machine-interactivity initiated by the medium.

We have a name for that now. We call it agentic AI. I didn’t predict the technology — I couldn’t have told you it would arrive as large language models. But the logic of active, interactive, networked, autonomous agents was already there in the model, a quarter of a century ago. That’s the difference between concept knowledge and tool knowledge: the tools of 2001 are long gone, but the structure still describes the systems everyone is suddenly excited about in 2026.

It’s a good reminder of why I think the way I do. The hype is always about the technology. The interesting question is always one level deeper — what is actually new here, and what does it let us build?

You can find me on LinkedIn, read more about my consultancy at fluidminds, or explore the dissertation that started all of this (Geschäftsmodelle in der digitalen Ökonomie on Google Books or on ResearchGate, 2001).