Mondragon Digital Cooperatives Platform

The entrepreneurship unit of the Mondragon Unibertsitatea Business School, Mondragon Team Academy, develops the “Platform Coop Venture Builder” project in order to energize the cooperative entrepreneurial ecosystem and a State network for research, promotion and acceleration of digital platform cooperatives .

In addition to Euskadi, this project will be developed in Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Andalusia with the help of different institutions and entities that promote collective entrepreneurship. Platform cooperatives are a growing phenomenon that represent an alternative to large, privately owned digital platforms.

These types of cooperatives are an example of how numerous learnings from traditional cooperatives in the State can be taken advantage of with the possibilities that digital work platforms present today, as well as their long history; offering decent and responsible work. It is also an opportunity for the cooperative movement to strengthen itself with the great potential for growth and scalability offered by digitalization and digital platform models.

Although there is a seed of state platform cooperatives, greater articulation, networking and coordinated work is still necessary in the search for strengthening the movement. From this perspective, the project “Platform Coop Venture Builder: Dynamization of the cooperative entrepreneurial ecosystem through the dissemination, research and incubation of platform cooperatives” arises, funded in the call for aid from the Comprehensive Plan to Promote the Social Economy for the generation of a network economic, inclusive and sustainable of 2022 and 2023, within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan executed by the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy of Spain with the Next Generation Funds of the European Union.

The purpose of the “Platform Coop Venture Builder” project is to energize the cooperative entrepreneurial ecosystem and a network of state research, promotion and acceleration of digital platform cooperatives. With the medium-long term objective of promoting cooperative regeneration and job creation linked to the digital economy and cooperative platforms.

What is a Venture Builder?

This project aims to create a Venture Builder Cooperative; a kind of start-up factory, whose usual operation is usually to make adaptations to ideas or business models that have worked in other countries or markets and apply them to the local market - and launch new start-ups. Its objective, therefore, is not only to support its own projects but also to incubate and accelerate existing projects, with potential for cooperative and social contributions in the field of digital platform cooperatives. This business model has differential values in terms of shared ownership, a process of co-creation and co-participation more focused on people and the common good than on technology or capital as sources of power.

The ethical principles of this Venture Builder are:

1. Property and collective decisions.
2. Cooperation between cooperatives.
3. Systemic vision, commitment to community reality.
4. Local and regional, generation of value and impact.
5. Social transformation.
6. Equality and integration.