Alexander Osterwalder


Alexander Osterwalder is a Swiss business theorist, author, speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur, known for his work on business modeling and the development of the Business Model Canvas.

Biography

Born 1974 in St. Gallen, Osterwalder obtained his MA in Political Science in 2000 at the University of Lausanne, where in 2004 he also obtained his PhD in Management Information Systems under Yves Pigneur with the thesis, entitled "The Business Model Ontology - a proposition in a design science approach."
In 1999 Osterwalder co-founded his first startup Netfinance.ch, which focused on financial literacy. He was journalist for the Swiss business magazine BILANZ in 2000–01, and Senior Research Fellow back at the University of Lausanne from 2000 to 2005 in the time he finished his PhD research. In 2006 he founded BusinessModelDesign.com, and in 2010 he co-founded the consultancy firm Strategyzer, which has provided over 5 million people with Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas.
In the late 2000s "Osterwalder and a team of 470 co-creators published a popular model for describing business models: the Business Model Canvas. The Business Model Canvas offers you an excellent model to further develop your ideas about the business model for monetizing data."

Selected publications

Articles, a selection: