Ethos is a worker owned cooperative. Our partners are motivated more by creating social value than just working for money alone. So it’s probably worth defining what we mean by social value. We like this definition:
Social Value is a measure of the importance that an individual or community places in a change that results in altered experiences in their lives.
Examples of social value might be the value we experience from increasing our confidence, or from living next to a community park or at the community level perhaps improved air quality. These things are important to us, but are not commonly expressed or measured in the same way that financial value is.
We also want to make money, profit and to earn a good living.
As our interests are potentially vast, we only work three Themes at a time. Currently we are working on
- Smarter Places (e.g. Guildford, Geomii.co.uk, Parking)
- Work transition and planning in the context of “the future of work” (e.g. SkillsPlanner, BuildingPathways, Buildlondon, Buildforce), and
- Smarter organisational collaboration (e.g. TeamArmy, Teampolice, Yeldall, Joining the Dots)
We draw on 20 years of IP, products, services and capabilities in order to incubate new business ventures whose interest is to deliver this change. Some examples of early or sustainable work include:
Our core team is always small (<20 people) BUT we transition people through Ethos to our ventures where they work on delivering. Hence our network and ecosystem is forever expanding! Partners that have transitioned through Ethos remain part of the cooperative and benefit from Ethos profit share but not regular income. Whereas the staff in Ethos core at any time rely on their income from Ethos rather than the spinouts.