AMSTERDAM, Nov. 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- This month saw the milestone of 1 million copies of international bestseller Business Model Generation sold. The book, which was written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, was self-published in 2009 by Patrick van der Pijl (CEO of Amsterdam-based Business Models Inc.). Business Model Generation grew to become a global management classic and has gone to print in 30 languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German and Spanish, in addition to English.
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Business Model Generation is a handbook for analysing and innovating business models. It combines strategy and business design in a practical way. Business models and innovation techniques are presented in a visual and comprehensible way thanks to clever design. This working method, which was new to the management world back in 2009, is now more and more applied universally.
The publishing method was also innovative. Patrick van der Pijl was so impressed with Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur's vision of business innovation in 2008, he encouraged them to write the book while personally handling the production process. He opted for a revolutionary business model: crowd funding, co-creation and self-publishing. Traditional publishers only showed interest when sales of the book increased. Approximately 500,000 copies of the English edition were sold, a large proportion of these in the US. However, countries such as China (125,000 copies sold) and Korea (40,000 sold) showed great demand for the book in their own language, as well.
Patrick van der Pijl on Business Model Generation: "Students, start-ups, entrepreneurs, strategists, innovation managers and CEOs all benefit from this. The book is now a global phenomenon and an internationally recognised standard. It stimulates alternative approaches to business models and is more effective and challenging than lengthy business plans."
Based on the principles of Business Model Generation and his recent book Value Proposition Design, Alexander Osterwalder offers now international masterclasses. Patrick van der Pijl is CEO and founder of Business Models Inc. (head office in Amsterdam and locations in UK, USA, Australia/ New Zealand, Taiwan, Turkey, Germany and Romania) and helps organizations to innovate and redesign their business (model), mainly basing his approach on Business Model Generation.
