Table 5 Illustrative examples of value interventions

An illustration of an internal value intervention is provided by a recruiting business based in Toronto, Canada. Since its establishment in the 1950s, the firm has operated as a regular business. However, through a change of leadership in the last decade, the company has fundamentally reoriented its purpose towards providing work with ‘meaning.’ The company radically restructured its internal decision-making processes to empower employees and embed value-driven principles in all business operations, including providing meaningful work, supporting community engagement and volunteering, and shifting to environmental-friendly practices. In 2011, the business became one of Canada’s founding Benefit Corporations (B-corps), and the firm continues to strive to increase its rating in the rigorous B-Corp assessment.

An illustration of an external value intervention is provided by a group of entrepreneurs in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The group required an affordable location to sell artisanal food products. After a prolonged search, they obtained permission from the municipality to temporarily occupy and renovate an empty warehouse located in one of Rotterdam’s peninsulas. The collective efforts to establish the ‘entrepreneur market’ quickly extended beyond their warehouse space, leading to changes in administrative procedures and drawing interest from developers. As a collaboratively governed makers-space in a repurposed warehouse, the ‘entrepreneur market’ established a precedent for other initiatives to repurpose vacant spaces. Moreover, it helped significantly to change the perception of the peninsula from a problem area to an area of potential and under-utilized space, resulting in a new collective identity of the neighborhood.