Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. I'm so excited. Alexander Osterwalder is a Swiss business scientist, entrepreneur, author, and strategy consultant. You probably know him if you've tuned in, based on his work on Business Model Generation. He's written the Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, co-founder of Strategyzer, and author of the new book, The Invincible Company. That's why we wanted to have him on the show. So welcome Alex. Alexander Osterwalder: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you here. You're coming to us all the way from Switzerland, but you've always been a big mentor of mine. And a lot of the folks that you have around your circle, whether it's David Bland or Tendayi Viki and that. We've learned quite a bit about corporate innovation, startup innovation, and I wanted you to have you on the show to talk about your new book and some of the new things that you're seeing in this world. For folks who aren't as familiar with your work, can you give us an arc of how you started with Business Model Generation and how you got into The Invincible Company? Alexander Osterwalder: That's going back pretty far. Right. But years ago, we published a book called Business Model Generation. Actually, published it with my former PhD Supervisor Yves Pigneur. He's an academic. And I went out into the business world and our idea was, you know, bringing a better way to describe and change business models to the world. So, we created the business model canvas, which comes out of my PhD dissertation and the tool and the book took off like crazy.So now there are millions, literally millions of people around the world using the Business Model Canvas, which is this simple tool to sketch out business models. And then the book took off and is now selling over 50 languages. So, it was really fun to see how that took off. But again, it's one tool and one tool doesn't solve everything. Right? I like to make this analogy. If your surgeon walks into the operating theater with a Swiss army knife, you're going to run away. Right. There is no one business tool that does everything, and that was never our intention with the Business Model Canvas. So over time companies we were working with, we were seeing the different challenges that they had when it comes to innovation.So, we expanded the toolbox and, you know, the big, first expansion, it was meeting Steve Blank, the father of the Lean Startup movement, and then putting that tool set together. And then Eric Reese made it popular throughout the world. Right. So that was the next kind of step. And then we just always asked ourselves, okay, what does the world now need based on the problems we see. And we always say, when companies can't innovate, we don't blame them. We blame us. We say, okay, the thinkers and authors and doers and educators are not doing a good job. Consultant's not doing a good job. So I don't like blaming companies and saying, they don't know how to do this. They don't know how to do this because nobody's showing them right. Nobody becomes a surgeon or an innovation surgeon overnight. So that's how we kind of evolve with our books. Second one was Value Proposition Design. Third one was that Testing Business Ideas with where David Bland was the lead author.And then the last one is Invi