Business Thinking for Designers

Visualize your business model and strategy
To get a high-level idea of where your company plays and how 
it wins, there are two diagrams you can use: The Business 
Model Innovation Framework and the EcoSystem Map.

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48 
Develop your business perspective
The Business Model Innovation Framework
Developed by Oliver Gassmann and his team at the University 
of St. Gallen, the Business Model Innovation Framework is 
a simple diagram to quickly capture a business model. The 
diagram makes the business model tangible and helps confirm 
some of the assumptions you might have about a business. 
This diagram helps you answer four basic questions:
01. Who are the target customers of your company?
02. What does your company offer of value to those 
customers? (delivering value) 
03. How does your company produce the offer? (creating 
value) 
04. Why does that offer generate value for the company? 
(capturing value) 
Perhaps you’re asking yourself why the word “value” is used 
rather than revenue in #4. While revenue is very important, 
many startups are initially focused on growth. These hyper-
growth models are set up to create large customer bases and 
then find sustainable revenue models later. Value is specified 
in each of the answers to these four questions.

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49 
Develop your business perspective
To create the diagram, draw a triangle and place a circle at 
each point and in the center. Each circle represents one of the 
questions above. (See Figure 3-1)
Figure 3-1: Business Model Innovation Framework – the “magic 
triangle”
After drawing the diagram, the next step is to provide two to 
three answers per question. Start with the target customers, 
then the value provided, how it’s provided, and why it’s 
valuable to the company. 
As an example, here’s a business model I created for the online 
payments processing company Stripe (Figure 3-2). Stripe 

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50 
Develop your business perspective
targets organizations that want to accept online payments in a 
seamless and simple way. To reduce the complexity and time 
it takes to integrate these systems, Stripe provides a “seven 
lines of code” solution for accepting payments. Using the 
questions, I formed a quick hypothesis of the business model 
I’d be willing to put in front of my business partners.
Figure 3-2: A example of the BMI “magic triangle” for Stripe