Mondragon is the dominant business and employer in the Basque region, which boasts Spain's highest Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita at E37 000 and ranks top in Europe's human development index and seventh globally.
To see how they did it, the committee visited the Mondragon headquarters in three of its cooperatives; none of which can form to our preconception of what a cooperative is. In South Africa the failure rate of cooperatives is 88%, so we have a lot to learn.