Origins & Evolution

1. History

The foundation of Business Design was initially invented at the Technical University of Munich, where many research teams were seeking support to bring their mostly technical inventions to the market. The challenge was to bring business and entrepreneurial thinking into the world of technology experts. Through a close link to Stanford University and the so-called "D-School", we used and recycled many interesting ideas from the world of Design Thinking and spiced them up with a business strategy perspective. A first toolset consisting of large-scale workshop templates helped us facilitate meetings and workshops with research teams.

Over the years, a new company (Orange Hills GmbH) has been established, and the focus moved from research to corporate teams. We found similar challenges in this new space, but we were confronted with many more. The new Organisational Context was so different that we had to extend the toolset with a first process definition on how to run agile innovation projects. We came up with the idea to compress innovation work into 10-week cycles to increase the energy level and commitment of all participants from day 1. The duration of 10 weeks per cycle gave the Project Teams enough time to do proper research, build Business Models and validate them, but also put them under pressure to work on their projects on a regular basis. We called these projects "sprints".

As the demand for successful innovation management increased over the years, we started another major shift in the evolution of Business Design. Having good toolsets and innovation processes is a great starting point. As the management's expectations of innovation management grew significantly, we learned through the facilitation of hundreds of "sprints" and workshops that the only solution for lasting and predictable success with innovation is the implementation of a complete "innovation management system" consisting of an End-to-End Innovation Process covering the entire range from strategy to the market, clear Roles and guidance for Leadership and Governance. All these elements together and well integrated are our key to success to this day.

Today, the sprint lives on in Phase IV, where ideas are validated and refined in 10-week iterations. It has been joined by the phases in front of it and behind it: from the Picture of the Future in Phase I to the go-to-market in Phase V. Together they form the end-to-end innovation process as it stands today.

The latest step is AI. In 2026, we turned recurring tasks into "AI Skills", which the AI Library makes available across all five phases: analysing messy research data, summarising and translating, building visual models, landing page variants and digital prototypes. That makes Business Design faster, but it doesn't replace it. AI works backwards from existing data. A new business needs a theory about the future, and building that theory stays with the team – you remain the designer of your own innovation.

Business Design is a unique combination of different approaches and methods such as R&D, Business Modelling, Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Strategic Management, Organisational Psychology and Engineering. We haven't reinvented the wheel but created a consistent and powerful framework that truly covers the entire journey from ideas to market success.

2. Business Design ≠ R&D

R&D (= research & development) is very often focused on technical feasibility studies to figure out whether a technology or material can be used in products, software systems etc. The aim is to learn about technical questions. We use elements of R&D when we explore new playgrounds, which can be driven by new technologies. R&D asks whether something can be built. It rarely asks whether anyone will pay for it – and that is where Business Design starts.

3. Business Design ≠ UI/UX

UI/UX deals with questions of how to build a certain product, service or software along so-called customer or user journeys. Within Business Design, UI/UX is a very valuable discipline when we implement and validate new ideas with customers and users, which usually happens in Phase IV of the End-to-End Innovation Process. UI/UX shapes how a product works for its users. Business Design first decides whether the product should exist at all, and how it makes money.

4. Business Design ≠ Design Thinking

Design Thinking has championed a discipline called "Human Factors" and made a very valuable contribution in the way we empathise with customers through qualitative research and observations. We use these elements heavily when we explore playgrounds and discover customers and users in Phase II. Design Thinking, however, doesn't care that much about the Organisational Context and business questions, which is why we have designed Business Design with a much broader scope.

5. Business Design ≠ Business Modelling

Thanks to the people behind "Business Model Generation", many of us have started thinking in Business Models, not only products, services, features etc. This was a great contribution to the world of management and strategy. Nevertheless, filling in the original Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas is only 1% of the effort needed to turn ideas into practice. We use a revised version of the Business Model Canvas in our projects as well.

6. Business Design ≠ Lean Startup

Business Design is based on the same idea of "agile" development and learning processes as many other approaches that have been out there for years, such as SCRUM, Extreme Programming or Lean Startup. Lean Startup has, in fact, propelled "agile" thinking to the business level, which has actually opened up the market for Business Design. Business Design, however, goes beyond the basic ideas of Lean Startup by structuring every single step necessary to build new businesses.