Our Story
How OFMOS® began, what drives it, and where it's headed.
1. The Realization
Why Value Erodes and What That Means for Strategy
The story of OFMOS® does not begin with a research program. It begins with a copier.
In the mid-1990s, Cristian Mitreanu started his career as a sales engineer for Minolta in Romania — a country that had opened its markets only a few years earlier, after the fall of communism in 1989. Copiers were premium products. Businesses were acquiring them for the first time. The sales process was consultative: understanding the customer's needs, explaining the technology, building a case for the investment. Every sale was a relationship.
In late 1999, Cristian moved to the United States. Within months, he noticed something that reframed everything he thought he knew about business: you could buy small copiers at a next-door Walgreens in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. No consultation. No relationship. No explanation needed. The same category of product that required a skilled sales professional in Romania almost at the same moment was a commodity in America — sitting on a shelf next to office supplies, sold by price alone.
The realization was immediate: Romania was already moving toward the same economic structure as the West, so seeing copiers in an American grocery store was like traveling into the future of the same market. In a free market economy, if all conditions stay steady, the approach to bringing product to market shifts over time from a consultative approach suited for high-value, differentiated products to a transactional approach suited for low-value, undifferentiated ones — also triggering transformations of the entire business. And it was not long until he realized that the force that drives that shift is not competition. It is not technology. It is learning — the accumulated knowledge of customers who, over time, strip away the layers of meaning and novelty that once made the product feel valuable.
This was not the first time Cristian had seen the pattern. In the 1990s, he had watched Romania's PC assembly businesses — small companies building computers to order — disappear almost overnight as the product commoditized and customers shifted to specialized technology stores. There too, sales professionals calling on customers quickly found themselves shut out because the customers, now armed with the necessary knowledge, would rather browse the shelves of a store. The same force. The same direction. Different product, different speed, same outcome.
In 2002, still carrying the "traveling into the future" realization, Cristian began articulating and further developing these insights. As a business professional, he was interested in explanation — actionable explanation to help him personally navigate the new environment, and explanation captured as a framework that might help him get a consulting job. This was not a big study or synthesis of the previous literature — that deeper engagement came later, as the ideas matured and the connections to existing traditions became visible. He was not an academic. He observed fundamental dynamics and used logic to identify further patterns in how the world works. It took time to understand that this was a first-principles account of why these dynamics occur, what forces drive them, and whether they could be described with the same precision that the natural sciences bring to physical systems.
2. The Theories and the Framework
Two Decades of Research, Two Theories, Two Parallel Developments
That research initiative — which Cristian initially called "Evolving Solutions" when he began writing in late 2002 — produced its first formal output in 2004. In 2003, Cristian submitted a manuscript to the Harvard Business Review. It was rejected. Based on that work, he published the paper Strategy, Redefined on his website RedefiningStrategy.com in 2004. The paper presented the customer-centric strategy framework that would become the Ofmos Theory of Business.
Over the next two decades, the research produced two first-principles theories: the One-Need Theory of Behavior, which explains how individuals decide and why value erodes over time, and the Ofmos Theory of Business, which extends that logic to companies and economies by identifying the commoditization force that governs every offering in every market and the strategic dynamics of vendor innovation.
The key publications along the way: Strategy, Redefined (2004) on RedefiningStrategy.com. An opinion piece in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Is Strategy a Bad Word? (2006). Spointra and the Secret of Business Success (2007), a self-published picture-book introduction to the Ofmos Theory. And A Natural Theory of Needs and Value (2018), a revised and extended presentation of the One-Need Theory.
Those theories gave rise to two parallel developments. The first is the Five Scales of the Business Big Picture — a framework that identifies five levels of reality at which strategic thinking operates, from the individual decision to the economy as a whole. It stands on its own and can be applied through games, courses, workshops, coaching, or self-directed study. The second is the OFMOS® family of games and simulations — interactive models built on the same foundational theories, whose mechanics are a direct structural expression of the dynamics the theories describe. The two come together in the strategy learning solutions: designed experiences developed around the games and structured by the framework.
3. The Game
From Video Game Concept to Tabletop Family
The idea of translating the theory into a game emerged early. Given the highly visual expression of the Ofmos Theory — offerings moving on a two-dimensional map under the pressure of commoditization and through the vendor's strategic innovation actions — the connection to game mechanics was natural. But the game was also conceived as a strategic vehicle: knowing that foundational ideas take years, if not decades, to be adopted, a compelling game could serve as the entry point that a theoretical paper could not.
For the first several years, influenced by the era of Facebook games and the casual gaming explosion, the game was envisioned as a video game. In 2011, a proof-of-concept was developed with the help of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — a prototype now referred to as OFMOS® Flow.
In 2016, inspired by the renaissance of tabletop gaming — fueled by 3D printing, crowdfunding, and a growing audience for games with intellectual depth — Cristian began developing a board game version. The approach was unlike most board game development, where designers draw inspiration from existing games. Cristian needed the game to be a direct structural expression of the theory — a simplified model, an orrery of business. Every mechanic had to correspond to a dynamic the theory predicts. Every financial consequence had to reflect the value logic the theory describes. The result was a patented game system (US11285378, USD833533).
But the early designs, faithful as they were to the theory, were heavy — demanding simulations that required significant time and cognitive investment. The first to reach the prototyping stage was what is now OFMOS® Professional, a complex simulation with multi-stage portfolio evolution and dice-driven organizational learning mechanics. A first Kickstarter campaign in mid-2018 did not reach its funding goal.
A few months later, in September 2018, Cristian participated in the Falling Walls Lab competition at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory with a proposal titled Breaking the Wall of Short-Termism. He did not win. But during a conversation after the presentation — in which Cristian had described ofmos as "think of them as a bunch of particles" — a physics professor responded: "You have something there." The moment confirmed that the theoretical architecture had resonance outside business academia, and it led Cristian to complexity science — the intellectual tradition that would become a pillar of the Five Scales of the Business Big Picture framework.
A second Kickstarter campaign later that year also did not reach its funding goal. But the two campaigns and the Falling Walls experience together clarified a strategic insight that the theories themselves would predict: the entry point matters. A simpler, more accessible game was needed before the full vision could reach its audience.
Through years of iteration and testing, the family took shape — from OFMOS® Academic to OFMOS® Professional to OFMOS® Classic, each progressively more accessible while preserving the theoretical core. Most of the family remains at the prototype stage. In 2023, Cristian developed Mushroom Gangs™ — a fully thematic version that wraps the core mechanics in a playful world with no business language at all, proving that the game system could stand on its own as pure strategic entertainment.
In late 2024, OFMOS® Essential emerged at the intersection of the entire family: playable as a pure strategy game by shuffling the tiles that make up the board, or as a rigorous business simulation with every action mapped to its theoretical meaning. Accessible enough for a kitchen table. Rigorous enough for a graduate classroom. The 99 Prototypes Edition — handcrafted, numbered, and signed by Cristian — was published in October 2024 as a bridge to the upcoming main edition.
4. The Designer
Cristian Mitreanu
Cristian Mitreanu is a behavior and strategy researcher, game designer, author, and educator based in San Francisco. He founded Ofmos Universe — The Human Strategist Platform™ — the broader initiative that extends the foundational research into games, courses, books, and professional tools. OFMOS® Games and Simulations is the division behind the games described on this website. Ofmos Universe is the publisher of all OFMOS® games and simulations.
His research, which began in 2002, produced two first-principles theories — the One-Need Theory of Behavior and the Ofmos Theory of Business — and the Five Scales of the Business Big Picture, a strategy framework grounded in complexity science. That same research produced the patented game system (US11285378, USD833533) at the core of OFMOS®. His work has appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review.
From that research, he designed and taught two Stanford Continuing Studies courses for product and marketing professionals, both built around his foundational theories: Corporate Strategy at Scale: Emerging Thinking on How Companies and Economies Evolve (Spring 2021), and Crafting Better Product Stories Using Deep Customer Insights (Winter 2022).
Cristian is a seasoned product and marketing professional who has brought products to market at technology and edtech companies including Cengage Learning and Apollo Education Group, and built corporate functions from scratch, including the marketing department at Veritas Investments. He founded TEDxUIUC, a TED-licensed program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2009 and organized the 2010 and 2011 annual conferences.
He holds an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MS in Management and a BS in Computer Science from Politehnica University of Timisoara in Romania — where, years earlier, his path to abstract and strategic thinking began with competitive mathematics, including reaching the final stage of the Romanian Mathematical Olympiad.
5. Where Things Stand
The Dual Launch and What Comes Next
OFMOS® Essential is the first published game in the family. The 99 Prototypes Edition — handcrafted, numbered, and signed — is available now. Every copy — 136 unique stamp applications and up to 248 freshly-cut edges per set — was built, numbered, and signed by Cristian personally. The main edition will be released in 2026, and will be launched with a crowdfunding campaign to be announced soon.
The Five Scales of the Business Big Picture is being published alongside the main edition of OFMOS® Essential — marking the simultaneous introduction of both the game and the independent strategy framework built on the foundational theories. The framework provides the architectural structure for developing strategic thinking, including five strategy learning solutions for educators and facilitators, developed around the OFMOS® family of games and simulations. Detailed Learning Guides for each scale are in development.
Development continues across the full family: Mushroom Gangs™, OFMOS® Classic, OFMOS® Professional, OFMOS® Academic, and OFMOS® Flow.
The research that started with a copier in Romania and a grocery store in America is now a family of games, an independent strategy framework for strategy learning and strategy making, and a growing community of players, educators, and professionals who believe that strategic judgment is built through experience, not passive instruction.
6. Get Involved
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