Business Model Innovation Consulting

Business model innovation consulting is the work of deciding whether the way your company creates and captures value is what is holding growth back, and redesigning it when it is. It starts from the demand you intend to own rather than from your current cost structure, and it is judged in economic profit rather than in revenue lines. Vivaldi has worked on growth and business model questions since 1999, from the multichannel retail model at Tchibo to the launch of TEND, a blockchain based investment platform built around experience rather than financial performance.

• Since 1999growth strategy and business model work
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

• The business runs well and has stopped growing from what it runs, so the next point of margin has to come from somewhere the current model does not reach.
• A category is reorganizing around a customer need the existing structure was never built to serve, and share is moving to companies that do not look like the usual competitor set.
• Revenue is holding and the multiple is not, because the market reads the plan as harvesting rather than as growth.
• Two or three model options are on the table, usually a subscription, a platform and a services wrap, and nobody can say which one the company has the right to run.
• A technology shift, most often AI, has moved a cost the current model was designed around, and the pricing logic behind the model no longer holds.

Why canvas workshops produce a tidier version of the same business

Most business model work starts inside the company. Revenue lines, cost structure, channel mix, a canvas on a wall, a session about what could be unbundled or rebundled. That sequence is comfortable and it reliably returns a cleaner version of what already exists, because every input to it came from the business as it is.

The order that changes the answer is the other one. Decide what the company intends to be the obvious answer to, then design the model that lets it be that. A model designed around a category is optimized against competitors who are solving a different problem for the same customer, which is how an incumbent can win every benchmark in its category and still lose the demand.

There is a second reason the starting point matters, and it is financial rather than strategic. Most model redesign is supply side: take cost out, move capital intensity, renegotiate the value chain. That work is often necessary and well executed, and all of it signals extraction, because every part of it is about getting more out of demand that already exists. A demand side change signals something different, that the earnings stream extends rather than tapers. Same balance sheet, different story, different multiple.

So the test we apply at the end of a redesign is blunt. If the company is not the answer to anything it was not the answer to before, it was a cost program with a new name, and it should be sold to the board as one.

What our business model innovation services include

Clients arrive asking for different things, a business model transformation, a pivot, a new revenue stream, a subscription or platform play. The work below is the same in each case, and it is sequenced so the expensive parts only get funded once the cheap parts have survived.

1. Business model diagnostic: is the model actually the constraint?

Before anything is redesigned we establish whether the model is what is limiting growth. Often it is not. Pricing discipline, a weak position, a sales motion that does not match the buying process and an under-funded category can all look like a model problem from the top floor. The diagnostic separates those, and it is the part of the engagement most likely to end with us advising you to keep the model you have.

2. Value creation and value capture redesign

Two separate questions, usually answered as one and usually answered wrong. What value does the company create, and for whom. Then, separately, how is it paid for that value, on what unit, by whom, and with what working capital and capital intensity behind it. A great deal of model work changes the first and leaves the second untouched, which produces a better offer rather than a new model.

3. Interaction and participation models

Models that compound create value between participants rather than deliver it to them. Customers, partners, suppliers, complementors and sometimes competitors each make the offer more valuable to the next. A model built on interactions gets stronger as participation grows; a model built on transactions has to buy every unit of growth it gets. That distinction is what separates a platform from a distribution agreement, and a membership from a discount scheme.

4. Permission testing with customers

Customers decide what a company is allowed to become. A model your buyers do not believe you have the right to run is a repositioning that fails, however sound the economics look on the page. We test permission with the customers the new model would depend on, before the capability build is funded, because permission is the cheapest thing to be wrong about early and the most expensive to be wrong about late.

5. The economic profit case

Every candidate model is run through the same arithmetic: what it does to price, to volume, and to the capital it consumes, and therefore whether it earns a return above the cost of that capital. A model that moves none of the three has not changed the business. This is the artifact that lets a CFO fund the change, and the reason we ask for one in the room from the first session.

6. Transition design and governance

A new model has to be run alongside the old one for longer than anyone plans for. We design the sequence: what gets piloted, what gets ring fenced from the existing P&L, which metrics the new model is allowed to be judged by during the period when it is small, and who owns the decision to scale or stop. Most model changes die here rather than at the design stage.

How a business model innovation engagement works

1. Frame. Leadership and CFO interviews, a read of where economic profit is actually earned today, and customer and non-customer research into the demand the company could serve. The output is a clear statement of whether the model is the constraint and which demand is worth building toward.
2. Design. Two or three model options built out properly: who pays, for what unit, through which participants, with what capital behind it. Each option carries its own economics rather than a shared one.
3. Test. Permission tested with customers, economics stress tested with finance, and the operating assumptions checked against what the company can credibly build. Options die here, which is the point.
4. Commit. One model, a transition sequence, the metrics it will be judged by while it is small, and the governance that decides when it scales or stops. We hand over a decision with its exclusions written down.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for business model innovation

We treat the model as a capital allocation question rather than a strategy exercise, which means the work is built to survive a CFO reading it. The brand question and the model question are handled by the same team, because what customers will let a company become is a hard constraint on what the model can be, not a communications problem to solve afterward.

That link is also where the financial argument comes from. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, Unrealized Value, found that companies with strong brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year between 2001 and 2024, turning a dollar invested into $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. The market pays a low multiple for a harvesting story and a high one for a growth story, and a business model is the clearest place that difference gets decided.

The work spans both ends of the problem. At one end, an established business reconsidering how it is paid, as with the multichannel retail model at Tchibo, where the question was how a store network earns its place once customers move freely between channels. At the other, a model designed from nothing, as with TEND, the blockchain based investment platform founded by the former Chief Digital Officer of Credit Suisse, where the basis of value was deliberately set as experience and community rather than financial performance.

Vivaldi has been doing this since 1999, with 10 offices on four continents and more than 200 published case studies, and the firm has been recognized five times in the WirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting awards for strategy and innovation.

How to evaluate a business model innovation consultant

Worth asking of any firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask where the first workshop starts. If it starts with your revenue lines rather than with demand, the output will be a tidier version of the business you already have.
• Ask what the model consumes, not only what it earns. Working capital and capital intensity decide whether a model produces economic profit. A proposal that models only revenue is half a proposal.
• Ask how they test permission. Customers decide what your company is allowed to become. A firm with no method for testing that is designing in a vacuum.
• Ask what compounds. If the hundredth participant makes the model no more valuable than the tenth, you have a new offer rather than a new model.
• Ask what evidence would make them advise against the change. A firm that has never told a client to keep its model has not been asked a hard enough question.

Business model innovation consultancy vs innovation agency vs large management consultancy?

Related work

This page is the canonical business model work: establishing whether the model is the constraint, and deciding what it should become. Several neighboring Vivaldi services answer narrower questions, and the boundaries are worth stating plainly.

• New Business Model Design is the build, not the diagnosis. Come here first if the question is still whether the model has to change; go there once it has to and the open question is what the specific new one is, with a platform and ecosystem emphasis.
• Business Experimentation tests a single assumption cheaply before anyone commits capital to it. It is a method applied inside a model decision rather than the decision itself.
• Experimentation and Ventures stands up new businesses as options alongside the core, for companies that have decided to buy optionality rather than redesign what they already run.
• AI Business Model Innovation Strategy answers a narrower version of this page’s question: which assumptions in the current model were built around costs that AI is now collapsing, and what becomes viable when they fall.
• Innovation Strategy sets where a company will innovate and with what ambition, across more than the model.
• Growth Strategy decides where growth will come from, of which a model change is one possible answer among several.
• Product and Service Innovation changes what you sell. This page changes who pays, for what unit, and on what basis.
• Open Innovation brings outside partners into the innovation process itself, rather than into the economics of the model.
• Innovation Playbook codifies how the company innovates repeatedly, after the direction is set.

All of it sits inside our Growth Strategy and Innovation practice, part of Brand, Innovation and Experience at Vivaldi.

Business model innovation consulting in the US and worldwide

We run this work from 10 offices on four continents, with US, European and Asian teams on the same engagement where the model crosses markets, which it usually does. Models rarely transfer cleanly: what customers will pay for, who the credible participants are, and how channels are structured differ enough between markets that a model proven in one can fail in another for reasons that have nothing to do with the idea. Where a model is intended to travel, we test permission and economics in each major market before the transition plan is written, rather than designing for the home market and translating afterward.