37 community interest. Across the fashion industry, fair trade enterprises like Manos del Uruguay, Creative Handicrafts and Sasha have generated models where their workers or artisans are their owners and control the governance. They then use their profits to create additional benefits for their workers and artisans, such as training and profit sharing alongside investing into the success of the business. A wave of enterprise design innovation is sweeping through the world of business. From Steward Ownership to social enterprise, from cooperatives to employee-ownership, diverse and bespoke ways of designing businesses are emerging. One recent verification system that is proving accessible, affordable and focused on fostering such enterprise design innovations is People and Planet First. New tools and solutions to redesign business and finance A key question in starting businesses based on such models, or converting existing businesses to them, is the design of investment and finance. Critically, new models of financing such businesses are also being developed. This includes Transform Finance’s Alternative Ownership Enterprise Learning Hub, where investors are sharing and learning about ways they can shape investment approaches to support such models. Abaca’s Capital Explorer tool is also a useful guide that helps entrepreneurs to explore a diverse range of options for drawing in the investment they need, as alternatives to venture capital, which is rarely a good fit for such enterprise designs. Other initiatives are also helping, including the E2C – Exit to Community tool by Zebra’s Unite and Media Design Lab, to help business founders explore new ownership models for their businesses. Leaving behind outdated business designs is possible. It requires action by investors, as the initiatives by Transform Finance and others demonstrate. It requires innovations in public policy, as explored in a short guide for policy-makers published with DEAL – Doughnut Economics Action Lab5. Perhaps most critically, it requires ambitious and purpose led business leaders to develop the enterprise designs the world needs. DEAL has built a tool6 to guide these business leaders through a process of exploring transformations in their design that could unlock the needed action. In doing so, they will be creating the diverse models of business finally capable of breathing respect into the planet that hosts us, and the humanity that unites us. 5Available online @ wwwdoughnuteconomics.org/tools/public-policies-to-foster-regenerative-businesses 6 Downloadable online @ www.doughnuteconomics.org/tools/doughnut-design-for-business-core-tool
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