Valuing Digital Business Designs and Platforms

This book develops an interwoven framework for the strategic and financial valuation of digital business designs and platform companies which became game changers for a multitude of ecosystems in the 21st century. But, also incumbents of traditional industries are challenged by those digital natives and have therefore either to revitalize their business design or facing the risk to be marginalized.

The business design twin of innovation is resilience to create lasting competitive advantage and capture value for the post-pandemic world of the 20s. The ultimate idea of the book rests on the hypothesis that only the combination of business design analytics - 10C Business Design and the 8 strategic levers of platform strength - with intense financial modeling - Reverse DCF - enables a true understanding of the competitive advantage and value of such business designs.

Based on a tailored strategic-financial conceptual framework a set of high-profile, new case studies will highlight the working principles and application of the concept.

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Feix is Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg (Germany) since 2012. His research interests are focused on M&A, Corporate Finance and Corporate Strategy. Additionally, he is program director and manager of the international Master Program ”International Business & Finance (IBF)“. Besides, he teaches M&A at Harvard University (US), M&A at INSECC University in Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux, Global Innovation Management at Geneva University (Switzerland) and Corporate Finance at Bucharest University (Rumania).

Before he re-joined the world of science he worked more than 15 years as inhouse-consultant for Daimler AG, and as Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy for Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH and later Knorr-Bremse AG. Within this timeframe he realized globally more than 70 transactions with his teams. Additionally, he is board member of the Bundesverband M&A since 2007, where he does focus on corporate valuation, integration strategies and digital M&A tools and processes.

Early 2020 his new M&A-book “End-to-End M&A Process Design – Resilient Business Model Innovation“ was released. This M&A Process Design framework was for the first time fully applied in the Harvard Summer School lectures 2019 and 2020 on “Global M&A Design for the Twenty-First Century: Digital Business Model Innovation and Cross-Border Deals”.