Designing Your Company: Creating, Delivering, and Capturing Value

Abstract

These notes describe a series of steps for you to design your company and how it will create, deliver, and capture economic value—three necessary conditions for an economically sustainable enterprise, whether a large established enterprise or entrepreneurial start-up. A distillation of advanced topics of managing through industry and competitive dynamics, and financial calculations and valuation are also included.

Thus, these notes draw together and distill popular ideas in Business Strategy, Business Models, and Entrepreneurship, while grafting these ideas onto more foundational and integrated framework-of-frameworks. By succinctly covering the pith of ideas, their connections, and how they should be used—these notes are kept to roughly one hundred pages.

These notes are intended as a field guide, a teaching tool, a map of areas of research, and as a complement to usual textbooks and articles.

Keywords: Business models, entrepreneurship, large incumbent firms, competitive advantage, designing user value, capabilities, economic value, appropriability, game theory, industry disruption, technological discontinuity, industry analysis.