Charitable donations from ZEISS are an important source of funding for the university of Jena, where its technology was originally created. Its annual revenue exceeds 5 billion euros and annual profits 600 million euros. Its business consists of manufacturing optical systems, industrial measurements, and medical devices.

Today, more than hundred years later, ZEISS is thriving.

He also instituted a principle that the highest salary of any ZEISS employee cannot be higher than 12 times the lowest salary a worker gets after being at the company for two years. Abbe then introduced several important rights for the workers, amongst them a health and pension insurance for the workers and an 8-hour workday. The foundation ensures that the company cannot be sold and profits are either reinvested or donated to the common good. This likely led him to the insight that the value and the profits created by ZEISS did not belong just to him, but to everyone working at the company and society at large.Īfter the company’s founder Carl Zeiss died in 1888, Abbe created the Carl Zeiss foundation, which has owned ZEISS ever since. Abbe had worked as a professor at the university of the city of Jena, where he invented the technology behind ZEISS’s success. The original steward-ownership model was invented by Ernst Abbe, co-owner of the successful German optics manufacturing company ZEISS, founded in 1846. Steward-ownership is relatively new as a term, but the underlying concept is almost as old as limited liability corporations, the structure adopted by most modern companies. In this post, I’ll dive into the background of the model, how it works in practice, and how we’re applying it at Sharetribe.įirst, we need to go back in time more than a hundred years. At Sharetribe, we’ve opted for a structure called steward-ownership. In my previous post, I explained why we need to change incentive structures if we want to build companies that are a force for good in society.

Capitalism ii cannot issue shares