As autonomous workers grow in numbers and become more vulnerable to precariousness, cooperative structures flourish to allow those workers to mutualize risks and resources, thereby creating spaces of protection and autonomy. We argue that cooperatives of autonomous workers, in order to expand the range and quality of their services and to overcome the challenges that came with their increased size, need to engage in a formal design of their services, using a business modelling approach. Cooperatives of autonomous workers have never been the subject of a specific ontological development, nor have they used an ontological approach to help them solve business challenges. With this project, we take on both these issues in collaboration with a large cooperative of autonomous workers based in Brussels (i.e. Smart Coop), following an Action-Design-Research methodological framework.
1 Université Saint-Louis
Autonomous workers – workers who are not subordinated to the authority of an
employer – have been growing in number in the last few years (+16,35% between 2008
and 2015)
Cooperatives of autonomous workers aim at creating a work environment that allows
workers to maintain their autonomy while improving their job security and stability. To
do so, cooperatives of autonomous workers offer capabilities1 that usually belong to
companies – such as the ability to make invoices, recover VAT from professional
purchases, get an insurance, etc. – all the while providing workers with advantages that
1 We use Sen’s capability approach to describe a capability as “the alternative combinations of functionings
from which a person can choose. Thus, the notion of capability is essentially one of freedom—the range
of options a person has in deciding what kind of a life to lead”
This project is a joint work between researchers from Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles and practitioners from Smart, a large cooperative of autonomous workers based in Brussels. Smart has known an important growth since its creation in 1998: it now counts more than 35.000 users spread across 44 cities in 9 European countries. Smart is a particularly advanced instance of cooperative of autonomous workers. A unique feature developed by Smart is the possibility for workers to group into virtual “activities”, where capital can be gathered and invested into resources that are collectively owned, without the need for a legal status. With its expansion, Smart now has to deal with new organizational issues, not least of which is the need to continue to offer personalized services to its beneficiaries despite its size. This is the purpose of an internal project called redesign of services.
This project aims at further extending the model of cooperatives of autonomous workers towards more formalized and complex projects (section 2), using an ActionDesign-Research Methodology framework (section 3) and leveraging business and value-modelling ontologies that have proven their worth in other domains (section 4). 2
Cooperatives of autonomous workers such as Smart have the ambition of expanding the range and quality of their services to become more appealing for entrepreneurial activities who want to grow in a safe yet autonomous environment, mutualizing more of their resources within the cooperative when relevant. However, there is a lack of a clear specification of the elements and mechanisms that underlie the services of cooperatives of autonomous workers. At Smart in particular, the services are provided by more than 150 front-line employees called the “conseillers”. Despite the presence of a common software package that induces some standardization of practices, each conseiller has an important degree of autonomy in defining what the extent of the service is and may have a different approach in how to bring value to the users: some focus on a personal relationship while other favor an efficient, digital interaction; some give support to the users by helping them with their core-business issues while others focus on 2 Mutualization is a process through which several individuals share the ownership and the usage of a resource within a structure that they collectively govern, usually a cooperative. more peripheric issues such as administration or payroll so as to give the users the space to focus on their business issues. Further, the services are partially informal, i.e. some aspects of the service are not documented or accounted for at the company level, such as the personal relationship with the conseiller. Smart has had a pragmatic, informal, bottom-up approach, which has driven its success over the years as it allowed for a tailor-suited service definition.
This approach, however, has now reached a point where it hinders the ambitions of Smart. On the field, both users and conseillers express a clear demand for tools that can model the activity of the user and its interactions with Smart. This is particularly needed for when Smart or its users need to interact with external parties such as commercial partners, investors or public authorities. Indeed, there is no clear way to represent the business model of an activity hosted within Smart and Smart itself has no way of clearly representing an overview of its activities. Today, we see two types of modelling tools used in the Smart environment: (1) tools that are intended for traditional organizations but cannot represent the specificities of activities that are part of a cooperative of autonomous workers. The most widespread of those tools is the Business Model Canevas, which is used by conseillers and users alike, but cannot represent key elements that are core to the cooperative movement, such as the societal impact on beneficiaries or the organizational democracy; and (2) tools that have been crafted in the context of the cooperative movement, but lack theoretical foundations to support them. A good example is the “Coopcity Lean Canevas” (see annex), which is an adaptation from the Business Model Canevas and was intended to better represent activities in the social economics sector but has no theoretical foundations in design research.
We argue that because of this lack of tools, cooperatives of autonomous workers and Smart in particular have not been able to mutualize more resources and develop more complex services, such as making important investments and making a loss for a period of time, jointly owning a patent or a brand, invest in heavy machinery or large information systems. For instance, Smart had the project of creating of a value ecosystem where autonomous workers can offer services to each other. Given the large size of the community of members of Smart, it would have indeed been valuable to create a large value network. However, since there is no tool that gives an overview of the activities of autonomous workers, this project did not go through.
A clear definition of the activities embedded within cooperatives of autonomous workers and of the services that they provide is now needed for them to live up to their promise of creating a space of autonomy and security for autonomous workers. Smart, in a recent strategic note, stressed the importance of developing a service that is “adapted to activities that are conceived in a long-term entrepreneurial perspective. What needs to be developed is a management tool for an enterprise in a mutualized environment, in the context of a shared enterprise”3 (p. 13). We propose to use a structured, action-design-research approach precisely to support this process and make it widespread and durable. 3 A Shared Enterprise is an enterprise that is owned and governed by the people who benefit from it. A cooperative of autonomous workers is a shared enterprise.
Action-Design-Research (ADR) is a “research method for generating prescriptive
design knowledge through building and evaluating ensemble IT artifacts in an
organizational setting”
In ADR, after the problem is formulated (stage 1), the ADR team engages in an
iterative process consisting of three steps Building the IT artifact, Intervention in the
organization and Evaluation (BIE) (stage 2)
After enough iterations have been completed, comes the time for reflection and
learning (stage 3) and formalization of learning (stage 4).
4 Design Science Research is a research methodology aimed at formally describing and structuring
knowledge in a field
The purpose of this project is to develop a semantic model that formally describes a cooperative of autonomous workers such as Smart, the concepts that compose it and the way in which those concepts interact, which is essentially a business ontology: “a generic ontology applicable to various domains”, that is based on a top-level/enterprise ontology, which “describes the primitives that allow for defining very general concepts” (Global University Alliance, s. d.). A business ontology “aims to achieve coherent and goal-oriented organizational processes, structures, information provision and technology by providing holistic overviews” ( Boh and Yellin, in Gorkhali & Xu, 2017, p. 2)
Formally describing the business model of a cooperative of autonomous workers has
never been done before, yet early interactions with Smart management and workers has
shown that there is a need to clarify the meaning of key concepts of its future
development. An ontology would be particularly helpful in this situation, given that it aims at
describing a common vocabulary that will ensure that information can be shared
without ambiguity between all stakeholders of a project – human
This ontology will be based on existing business ontologies, of which we have identified several, each with advantages that for our purpose.
1- Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas
Next to the formal description of the cooperative of autonomous workers, our
intention is to operationalize the ontology with practical instruments that are used to model
exchanges in a value network. To this purpose, we are considering the REA Ontology
(Resource-Agent-Event)
The advantage of a design approach is that the artefact resulting from our work would be applicable not only to Smart, but to other situations as well. In the present project, the artefact that we are aiming for is a model or canvas that helps entrepreneurs determine which resources they should seek to mutualize, and to guide internal workers of a cooperative of autonomous workers (the conseillers in the case of Smart) in mutualizing these resources. 5
As a conclusion, we would like to stress the scientific interest that this project represents, as it would lead to the development of the first business ontology tailored for cooperatives of autonomous workers. To the best of our knowledge, neither has there been a design method that fits the specificities of the cooperative model, nor have cooperatives resorted to business ontologies to help them solve business challenges.
Besides this project also presents a practical interest in helping cooperatives of autonomous workers to streamline their mutualization operations, which would make this process more efficient and sustainable. A formal modelling of services could constitute the basis of a software package that would simplify and automate some of the effort of encapsulating an activity into a cooperative, which could greatly improve the quality of services of cooperatives of autonomous workers and helping them to live up to their promises of creating a space for autonomy and security for autonomous workers. 6
Coopcity is the public social entrepreneurship incubator for the Region of Brussels. It is closely linked with Smart, with whom they share their premises. This “Lean” Canevas, inspired and adapted from the original Business Model Canevas, is commonly used for activities hosted by Coopcity and Smart.
Retreived from https://3lbtyl135xio3wwjez47c891-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/79/2019/11/Lean-Canvas-COOPCITY.pdf