In collaboration with IBM. See how IBM is helping midsize businesses here.


Last summer, we set out to answer the question: “What does a GOOD company look like?” The GOOD Company Project was our quest to learn about midsize companies creating change and becoming industry leaders. It led us to innovative companies from all over the world that are making products and services that span from environmentally-conscious cleaning products to boxed snack crackers to electric cars. While these companies are incredibly diverse, all are working towards a smarter and better world. And after months of sharing their stories, we’re proud to present our list of the top 40 businesses that we think best represent the values of GOOD companies.

To help you get to know these 40 companies, we’ve created the GOOD Company Project interactive experience that lets you select and sort them by the industries you're interested in or by the GOOD badges they have earned. You can read related articles and watch exclusive videos and interviews to learn more about how these companies operate and their business philosophies. Plus, you can see how the companies stack up against each other by filtering by the different categories.

Go here to see who the top 40 companies were in the GOOD Company Project.

For the economy to thrive, mid-sized business needs to thrive. And for Andy Monshaw, the general manager of global small- and medium-sized businesses at IBM, helping those companies is his expertise. Monshaw has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry and has held several executive positions with IBM.

Check out the video to see GOOD chief community officer Max Schorr talk to Monshaw about the importance of mid-sized businesses in our economy, the role technology plays, and how IBM is helping clients accelerate their businesses.

To learn about other GOOD companies making a difference, check out the GOOD Company Project.

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible mid-sized companies, selected Just Born, a candy company headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as a finalist in the GOOD Company Project.

The venerable, family-owned confectioner deluges the world in Peeps during the Easter season—and pretty much the rest of the year, too. Just Born also makes classics like Mike & Ike and Peanut Chews, but just because the company has been making candy for decades doesn't mean it isn't keeping up with the latest trends in business: It's leveraged technology and trade to expand its business around the world in the last decade, making its candy available to 1.5 billion people worldwide. Despite its global outlook, Just Born hasn't forgotten its roots, manufacturing all its candies at its Bethlehem headquarters, where it is engages the community with a comprehensive volunteer program and donations to over 150 local charities, nonprofits and schools. 

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible mid-sized companies, selected Music Mastermind, a music software development company headquartered in Calabasas, California, as a finalist in the GOOD Company Project.

Music Mastermind is on a mission to make everyone find their inner composer. The company is committed to developing music technology that breaks down the barrier between appreciating music and creating it. Founded in 2008 by Matt Serletic—a Grammy Award-winning producer-songwriter and former chairman and CEO of Virgin Records—and Bo Bazylevsky, former managing director and global head of emerging markets corporate bond trading at JP Morgan, the company hopes to benefit from the growing trend in user-created content. Unlike conventional music creation software, Music Mastermind’s Zya allows users to create freely without needing special training or knowledge, and uses cloud computing to makes music creation accessible on PCs, tablets, or smart phones.

Water Entertainment Technology designs water features—the nine acres of fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas—or even grander, the 30-acre Dubai Fountain, the largest in the world. WET was founded by a group of former Disney Imagineers, including CEO Mark Fuller, who developed a unique “laminar-flow” nozzle as an engineering student. That nozzle is one of the innovations that make WET’s creations so unusual; others, developed in WET’s Burbank campus, include low-energy lighting, underwater robots, and even an ice fountain. The campus, which includes a newly opened “Idea Playground,” is home to the engineers, designers, choreographers, animators, and technologists whose collaborations are changing the way people think about water.

Business plan: Hire seven experts to work for a year building a complex product. Then, give the product away to anyone who wants it.

It doesn’t sound brilliant at first glance, but the success of San Francisco-based GOOD Company Project finalist Engine Yard, and the broader open-source community, demand a second look.

Engine Yard provides the infrastructure for companies looking to build software applications online, and takes pride in its commitment to open-source software—code that is freely available for use and modification—particularly the programming language Ruby and its web framework, Ruby on Rails (hence the company’s name). Engine Yard assigns some of its staff to develop open-source tools full-time, provides grants to open-source developers, and encourages more networking in open-source communities.

“This is what the market wants,” says Mark Gaydos, the company’s vice president of marketing. Developers don’t want to be dependent on proprietary software that companies might restrict, charge for, or simply stop supporting. 

“We are here not only for a profit,” Gaydos says, “but we are here to benefit the open-source community—and, candidly, that means benefitting your competitors.” The company has decided that's a winning proposition—Engine Yard benefited from open source in building its own service, and the company's executives say their commitment to open code has created far more benefits than costs. 

Engine Yard's business may not be easily understandable for the average web user, but it's important because we’re living in an increasingly app-based world. Software developers are creating tools that live in the “cloud”—in other words, they can be accessed over the internet or from your mobile phone rather than taking up space on your hard drive. Consumers are driving this: We expect to be able to do more than just gather information on the internet, we want to do something.

Of course, all that doing something requires infrastructure to handle an application’s behind-the-scenes work, the same way a restaurant needs a kitchen with stoves, electricity, and running water to put the final product on your plate. Engine Yard aims to provide software developers with the best "kitchen" possible so they can focus on making delicious food without worrying about the gas bill—or what happens when their venture takes off and hundreds of hungry customers are showing up outside. That means more innovation and better apps for users, with less hassle for developers.

“[Developers] just want someone else to handle the other issues and offload the management of a platform to someone else so they can focus purely on innovation, time to market, and providing the best experience to customers,” Gaydos says. “We want to be like your electricity—we’re always there, we’re always reliable.”

“The way I refer to it, is ‘expose complexity as necessary,’” says Nic Williams, the company’s vice president of technology. “Until you want to do that little bit extra, you shouldn’t need to look at what flavor of electricity you want.”

Since it was founded in 2006, the company has grown to 130 employees and, while executives don’t disclose its revenue, they believe it is five to 10 times bigger than any of its competitors—a client list that includes Nike, AOL, Apple, Disney, and MTV suggests that there is some weight behind the claim.

Still, Engine Yard’s niche—known in techie parlance as “Platform as a Service,” or PaaS—is becoming increasingly crowded. More and more companies are catering to the burgeoning crowd of app developers, including giants like Microsoft and Amazon (which also funds Engine Yard).

Engine Yard hopes to maintain its competitive advantage thanks to its track record at handling big projects and lots of users, the tools it provides customers who want to customize their platform, and the deep expertise of its team—including their familiarity and support of open-source communities. “The reason that we make these investments,” Williams wrote last spring, “is to ensure the health and success of the Ruby and Rails communities who form our core customer base.”

It’s a something of a symbiotic relationship: Engine Yard helps build sophisticated tools that make these programming languages more useful, and the more developers rely on those languages to build products, the more business there is for Engine Yard in supporting them.

Now, the company is focused on expanding its universe of collaborators with a significant investment in PHP, another open-source programming language, and making itself more useful to developers who are ready to take their projects to the next level with an emphasis on rapid scalability and managing large amounts of data.

They’ve got a pretty good test-case to work with. “We are our own customer, we live with the problems and we want to present those solutions,” Williams says.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user opensourceway

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible medium-sized companies, selected Finceramica, a biotech company from Faenza, Italy, as a finalist in the GOOD Company Project.

Finceramica was inspired by the traditional Italian pottery of Faenza to create a bio-ceramic that can be used as a prosthesis inside the human body. The Science and Technology Institute of Ceramics began research on the project in 1990 and later collaborated with Finceramica to develop bone implants that imitate the chemistry and structure of human bone. More than two decades later, the company is working to make these implants accessible to doctors everywhere. A new web platform allows real-time discussion between surgeons, prosthesis producers, and distributors, allowing for a highly collaborative process, plus faster production and delivery.

Maurice Leacock is a senior technical product manager at iRobot, which manufactures (among many other devices) the Roomba, the hands-free vacuum cleaner that bumps around your living room. He's also a husband and father of two (soon to be three). Between personal and professional obligations, he was kind enough to enlighten us about the mechanics of creating a real robot, the pratfalls of fictional ones, and why a microwave oven isn’t a robot at all.

What does a real robot look like?

We describe robots as devices, platforms or systems that “perform dull, dirty and dangerous jobs that folks are unwilling or unable to do.” That can be applied in quite a few ways. The Lexus that can park itself is technically a robot—it can semi-autonomously do something that usually requires complex human mechanics, brain power and a lot of practice to do accurately and precisely every time. And the machines that weld these cars together in manufacturing plants consistently, precisely and without taking sick days are definitely robots. They automate a task that used to require a skilled tradesman and years of apprenticeship to get just right.

All robots fundamentally have mechanical and electronic elements that are in most cases common and can be obtained in other devices and systems that cannot nor should not be classified as robots. What makes robots unique is a level and scope of system integration that harnesses the software, combined with sensors and behaviors required to do complex tasks that when observed, seem like and can fairly be described as intelligence.

But artificial intelligence and sentience—that's just the movies, right? 

Those terms imply that a device or being can or has become self-aware and can consider its place in the universe. Some have claimed that they have created self-aware robots, but these robots are not very practical. iRobot’s Ava platform is somewhat self-aware as it can learn its environment and then map it. It can also learn users' physical attributes and use that information to identify and interact in a unique way with individuals. But it is not sentient—it does not know that it exists nor does it know that it exists for any specific purpose. As we have seen in sci-fi, a sentient robot could care what job it was given; it could care whether it was operating or not operating. It may care that its human overlords gave it a job or role that put it in danger. But so far, there are no robots that I can think of that have become sentient. The robots we make at iRobot are driven by software and sensing. They do not ponder or reflect about what they are doing or why they are doing it. There are rules and they strictly govern their behavior. Decisions are optimized based on analytical and logical operations and calculations and not subject to any philosophical or personality trait.

So how is a robot different than, say, a microwave?

Until I can verbally speak to my microwave to tell it just how to do my cooking so that it tastes exactly like I want it to it and the microwave succeeds (think Star Trek replicator) then it is just a microwave. If it can make my favorite meal with no additional help from me then I might consider it to be a robot.

Replicators aside, you seem to be familiar with the world of fictional robots. Was it the C3POs and Terminators that first got you hooked? Or did an interest in robotics come later? 

I do watch a lot of movies. And of course sci-fi is my favorite genre. If I had to pick one robot from all media I’ve consumed it would be R. Daneel Olivaw. But it was not my love of all things mechanical in movies, TV or literature that got me here. Like most little kids with ambitious parents, I was given a Meccano set very early in life and a Capsela set after that. So eventually I put my time in at engineering school. But I didn’t really get bit by the robotics bug until just recently, when I started working with middle-school kids on their robotics programs while doing educational research and outreach in California.

Should I obtain a degree in robotics if I wanted to design and manufacture robots?

If you want to get your hands dirty and actually build, design, and create robots, then you want to get yourself a degree in computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or software development. If additionally you are interested in the behavioral aspects of robots, then on top of the technical degree, you want to become a full-fledged “roboticist.” To do that, you need a masters or Ph.D. level in one or more of the above disciplines and some biology, kinematics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, or advanced sensor research—preferably at MIT, CMU, Stanford, or other institutions with solid robotics programs. I was fortunate enough to have a solid general management background having done stints in mechanical design, development and advanced marketing and business development.

Is there still an element of the backyard inventor within the industry? 

There is still a little backyard inventor/sci-fi geek in many of the folks here, for sure. A large number of great ideas come from folks’ ideation in their spare time down in the basement or the garage at home. It does not hurt if these folks can also navigate the myriad business and practical realities in getting a product into consumers’ hot little hands, and are able to code in many computer languages or can build a manipulator from scratch.

Tell me a little bit more about your job, ‘senior technical product manager.’ What does that mean? 

The title is an amalgam of the responsibilities that two people would normally occupy—technical marketing and product marketing management. We are not yet a big enough company here at iRobot to have two folks splitting the functions, so for now we combine the two roles into one. There is a lot of product concept work—“fuzzy front-end” brainstorming product improvements or coming up with new product ideas to feed the process and meet customer expectations. That, in turn, leads to tons of planning and development, working with CAD designers, software engineers, electrical engineers to get the products designed for customers just right. Then there is technical writing and marketing documentation, guiding industrial design and user interface studies, sales support, packaging design, photo, and video shoots. From the tactical to the strategic, product management is kind of a “catch-all” role. My interests are at the front end to middle of the process. We spend a considerable amount of time in meetings and to tell the truth, there is a lot of consensus building and collaboration. We do a lot of negotiation. We don’t really design per se, but we heavily influence the net outcome of the design process and often have to get our hands dirty leveraging our technical backgrounds in “speaking engineer” to get things resolved.

Makin' It is the work of journalist Brady Welch and illustrator Skyler Swezy, the team behind YrDoingAGreatJob.com.

GOOD readers know we support community banks and credit unions, the local financial institutions that have a strong track record of providing fair banking to their customers and good service. But because of their smaller size, these institutions don’t always have the capability to invest in the technological innovation that is changing the way we bank, a challenge that hurts their chances of attracting the next generation of customers.

Bancvue, a GOOD Company Project finalist, has been working since 2004 to change that dynamic with Kasasa, an online banking site that links consumers with community banks that provide unique financial products—free checking accounts that offer cash back on purchases, high interest rates, or automatic charitable giving. Kasasa combines the virtues of community banking with cutting-edge retail banking technology. 

Last year, while reporting on online banking pioneer BankSimple, I spoke with Gabe Krajicek, Bancvue’s CEO. “What we want to do is help community financial institutions be able to give to their accountholders the same kind of seamless, integrated solution had they gone to one of the best online banks like ING or one of the more high-tech megabanks like Chase,“ Krajicek said.

Krajicek and his colleagues put together a network of more than 50 community banks under the umbrella of the Kasasa network. They also provide a suite of tech services to some 1,300 individual banking clients to help them offer the best online product possible. “It’s still about customer service, [now] what the word means is different,” he said. “Customer service is not just where your branches are located or how nice your reps are, but it’s how easy to use is your mobile application, is it available for iPad, do you have a really easy-to-use online banking system, interesting rewards that cut through the clutter, those types of services that community banks in general have not realized that they need to embrace.”

Some banks have been reluctant to join the Kasasa network, preferring to keep their own brand identity, but the folks at Bancvue believe that only collaboration between community banks will create a real shift in the banking industry. “We can see that share of deposits shifting back into community banks, [but] it’s going to be hard to make that happen unless there’s something we can all unite around,” Krajicek said. “What’s gotten them over the hump is when we’re able to go into markets where we have launched that brand, and show that institution has a 30 percent increase in the accounts… Bankers like numbers, and if you prove that numerically, they can get over the branding fear.”

And while the fear of change is perhaps most acute in community banking—home to some of the most traditional relationship banking still around—Krajicek warns of other industries that have been revolutionized by information technology with or without the consent of existing firms. If community bankers don’t adapt to digital retail banking, they’ll miss a chance to preserve the best legacies of their institutions—a focus on sustainable communities and healthy financing—in the new economy.

Photo courtesy of Kasasa

The brand agency Wolff Olins, founded in 1965, pioneered the idea of corporate identities as “strategy made visible.” Today, it might be best known for its controversial work on the 2012 London Olympics or for designing the (RED) campaign, which raised $170 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS. But the firm has earned attention from the GOOD Company Project because of its dedication to selecting clients who meet their evolving standards of social impact.

The marketing world is replete with accusations of greenwashing, and it’s easy for a slick agency to make a company appear to be more responsible than it is—and irresponsible companies are the ones most likely to need the help of a good branding team to convince the world. But as social media and the internet give voice to more and more people, it’s harder to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers. Actual authenticity is a more valuable marketing tool than clever presentation, and Wolff Olins is trying to capitalize on just that by finding clients who share their interest in social impact—or are willing to start moving in the right direction.

The company has been successful working for foundations and taking on pro bono projects like (RED) or this collaboration with a social innovator aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship in the Middle East. That same ethos is becoming part of its corporate work. “We don’t think you have to either work for charity or big business, but you can put this idea of positive impact at the center of what you do, that’s how you can achieve commercial success as well,” Wolff Olins CEO Karl Heiselman says. Heiselman, a 10-year veteran of the company—which is a subsidiary advertising giant Omincom—took the top job three years ago. 

“We look for a balance of things that we do pro bono, but we do work with someone like Unilever to resync their purpose,” Heiselman says. “If we have a big corporate client, we try to do our best to move them in a positive direction, but of course we that’s not the way we sell ourselves, that’s not the first slide—we want to be taken seriously as a world-class brand consultant.”

Most of Wolff Olins’ client screening happens before the agency offers up its services. The company does research to figure out a potential client’s history and it’s ability to execute a strategy with elements of social impact before pitching them. “It’s tough, because ultimately a lot of the impact we can have is dependent on the clients’ actions,” L.A. Hall, a senior designer in the company’s New York office, says. “We have a healthy tendency to stick to our guns by getting a good understanding of the client’s objectives before we even agree to work with them. We ask ourselves—is this something we will be really proud of?”

If that initial research doesn’t lead to a fruitful process, client-agency relationships can become a little more complicated. “Sometimes, you get excited by a client who is telling you that they want to move in a certain direction, I can think of one right now which I won’t name, [but] we really believed what they were saying,” Heiseleman says. “Sometimes your direct client believes it, too, but they’re in a larger organization with other stakeholders and—you just have to know when to pull out. We have had clients and client relationships where in the beginning we did our best and believe that they were going to make a change, and they didn’t make a change and we gracefully exited the business.”

Wolff Olins, Heiseleman says, isn’t trying to impose its worldview on its clients, but wants them instead to realize that their businesses can be a force for improvement in the world. That’s the brand agency’s own identity—something it hopes will contribute to its own success as companies feel increasing pressure to adopt socially responsible approaches and seek firms like Wolff Olins to help them do that. That culture also has a positive impact on the people inside the agency’s offices. “As a designer, I've always felt it's our opportunity and imperative to put our talents to good use—and not to contribute to more meaningless shit out in the world,” Hall says. “You want your work to resonate with your fellow peers and get the job done in the commercial sense, but you also hope to have some relevant social impact.”

Photo courtesy of Wolff Olins

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible medium-sized companies, selected New York-based women’s apparel designer Adrianna Papell as a finalist for the GOOD Company Project. 

Founded in 1979 by Harvey Berkman, Adrianna Papell started as a dress and blouse fashion house, but now caters to women of all ages for all occasions. They’ve stayed true to traditional dressmaking techniques and craft hand-sewn dresses in-house, but they're also strategic about embracing technology to better connect with their customers. An innovative cloud-based solution from Sky IT allows Adrianna Papell to view product performance at the point of sale so they can evaluate better what styles and looks women are looking for. From this data, the company can also see how products are selling, and break down those numbers by factors including geographic location and season.

Check out the video to see how Adrianna Papell is leveraging technology to better reach fashion-savvy women.

Read about how Martens is using Rally Software to improve the software business—and the world.

Learn more about the GOOD Company Project. 

See the books that inspire Rally Software CTO Ryan Martens' thoughts on business.

John Deere builds big tractors, lots of them, for agribusinesses all around the world. You probably wouldn’t think of a farm equipment manufacturer as particularly software-reliant, but each of those tractors has between 5 and 7 million lines of code—enough to control things like automated fertilizer and feed spreading on different schedules in different climes around the world.

So although John Deere is not a software company, it has a lot of software engineers in locations all around the world, all of whom need to make sure that the software in their machines works. That’s where Rally Software comes in: It provides the structure, coordination, and management that allows software developers to work efficiently in any organization.

But Rally isn’t a software company, either, according to founder and chief technology officer Ryan Martens. “It’s a very different company from a regular enterprise software company,” Martens says. “It’s much more of a restaurant-like mentality… nobody really wants to own software, I don’t know why anyone would buy it at all. It’s a means to an end, whether that end is entertainment or information management or work.”

Martens, who was trained as a civil engineer and is working on his fourth tech startup, sees his business as a hybrid of a consulting service that emphasizes efficiency and provides a framework for companies to tackle software development—a much more ephemeral and iterative process than, say, building a bridge. “The way we think about building stuff is really a kind of linear, big-bang approach, like a bridge,” Martens says. “Let’s get a team together to build a tractor to do X, let’s go get it, and when we’re done, we’re done. [But] how do I break up that product and manage it around the world when a lot of the deliverable is simply designs or software?”

In the case of John Deere, which has engineers in the United States, India and China, Rally helps the company synchronize teams around the world to work on software projects feature-by-feature with common tracking and visibility, based on the trendy concepts of “lean” and “agile” organizations looking to reduce waste and increase innovation.

This approach, Martens says, doesn’t just benefit companies, but workers as well. The principles he applies to his clients—and Martens is very philosophical about his work, judging by the references to books and thinkers he sprinkled throughout our interview—he applies to his company too, earning it recognition from independent organizations as a great workplace. “It’s much more humanistic, it makes folks that want to come to work, as opposed to you feel like you’re just a cog in a giant machine,” he says.

Rally also takes social impact seriously, encouraging volunteering and philanthropy. It has set a company goal of reaching net-zero impact by 2020—meaning the negative impacts of carbon usage and waste will be entirely offset by the company’s positive impact. “Working on the negative impacts is darn hard, it’s going to take some capital numbers to do that, our hope is to get into the capital market and fund those things pretty dramatically,” Martens says. “Google’s got a billion dollars in installed solar, and I don’t see why we can’t follow in those footsteps.”

But the founder doesn’t have a totally rosy view of what his company has accomplished so far. “It’s easy to try and describe yourself as if you’re at this point that is a GOOD company or that is a green company, [but][ we certainly didn’t start off like Ben and Jerry’s or TOMS Shoes; we certainly didn’t put impact first,” Martens says. “We have to both grow the income side of our business [and] the impact side of our business. We’re walking up a set of stairs that is maybe more analogous to most businesses that didn’t get to start like TOMS Shoes”

That’s ok by Martens, who sees his company as a laboratory to help solve not only business problems, but also social challenges, thanks to his faith in business as change agents in the new century, “I don’t think we’ve done anything fantastic yet; we copied a lot of things from a lot of folks,” he says. “We need a lot of great organizations in the world to be able to fix the problems of the last century.”

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Mostly Dans

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible medium-sized companies, selected German fashion retailer Gewandhaus Gruber as a finalist for the GOODCo Project. 

Originally established 355 years ago in Bavaria as a tailoring shop, Gewandhaus Gruber has stayed relevant in the fast-paced world of fashion through its commitment to a cutting-edge customer experience. The company's latest innovation is a customer rewards program that uses fingerprint technology to distribute savings and rewards. Customers scan their finger at the register to pay for their purchases without cards or cash, plus they instantly earn loyalty points and discounts.

Check out the video to learn how this cost-efficient technology gives the midsized business an edge over larger fashion competitors.

Wolff Olins

A brand consulting firm based in New York, London, and Dubai, Wolf Olins has been a player in the corporate communications and strategy world since its founding in 1965, working on branding for everything from Apple to the 2012 London Olympics. The agency has become an important player in the social-impact space, serving as the lead branding agency on the (RED) campaign, which worked with major companies to divert a share of the profits on (RED)-branded products to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, raising more than $180 million for the cause. Wolff Olins is also a partner in the i2 institute, an effort to encourage social innovation in the Middle East, and even started Honey Club, a social enterprise based around urban beekeeping, starting with the two hives on the roof of its own London office. Pretty sweet.

Rally Software

This Colorado-based enterprise software company founded in 2002 helps everyone from health care companies to financial giants and the Department of Defense better manage software development. By offering a software platform and coaching services, Rally Software helps companies manage projects and productivity to stay on-time and on-budget. A certified B Corporation, the company takes sustainability seriously and has made it a company goal to reach Net Zero—meaning its positive environmental impacts will outweigh its negative ones—by 2020. Rally was also named the best company to work for in Colorado two years running and is one of Outside magazine’s top 10 places to work. The company urges employees to donate 1 percent of their salaried time to volunteer efforts, and the CEO—known for recognizing introversion as an executive virtue—is even promoting standing desks as a health solution.

These two companies will be the last of our regular GOOD Company Project nominees this year, but keep checking back—we’ll have a lot more to talk about before the project officially wraps up. 

That realization, naturally, sparked some intense jealousy. It’s not just that they’re good this year, it’s that they’re never not good. The Packers have more championships than any other team. They’ve won their division five of the last 10 years. They dumped Brett Favre at exactly the right moment, then turned Aaron Rodgers into arguably the best quarterback in the league. They sell out every game, lead the league in merchandise sales, and have been the NFL’s golden franchise for as long as I’ve been watching football without inspiring the widespread hatred of the Yankees or Lakers.

And, of course, there’s a lot to envy in the experience of being a Packers fan—especially the fact that anyone with $250 can become an owner of the team.

This has created a seemingly impossible situation in which the football team in by far the smallest city—Green Bay is home to just 102,000 people—is the ninth-most valuable franchise in the league, according to Forbes. The team makes so much money that it is required to pay into the pot designed to redistribute revenue from large-market teams to the smaller ones. In an era in which egomaniacal, power-hungry sports owners like Dan Snyder, Donald Sterling, and Dan Gilbert seem to invent new forms of crazy all the time, the idea of crowdsourced ownership sounds pretty appealing. The Packers’ unique structure has earned them accolades from all over, including selection as a GOOD Company finalist.

The Packers are the only community-owned franchise in the United States (the NFL bans other teams from using the same model) but they weren’t the first in the world. FC Barcelona, the Spanish soccer club and perennial Champions League contender, has been owned by fans since it was founded in 1899. Considering the massive financial and athletic success of those two teams, that no one else has followed their lead—as well as the NFL’s continued hostility toward a model that works—borders on the inexplicable.

The advantages to community ownership stretch far beyond engendering good will from fans. Revenue generated by the Packers or Barcelona is immediately reinvested rather than lining an owner’s pocket. When team officials concluded this year that legendary Lambeau Field needed $130 million worth of renovations, they put 250,000 shares of stock up for sale. It creates better fans who are literally invested in a way others aren’t—when Ronaldinho, arguably the best footballer in the world, played for Barça from 2003 to 2008, the number of paid members increased by 70 percent.

Furthermore, taking every team public could help avoid nasty labor situations like this year’s NFL and NBA lockouts by removing the zero-sum element of financial disputes between owners and players. During the NFL lockout, league commissioner Roger Goodell sent Packers CEO Mark Murphy (who serves at the will of a board of directors) as an emissary to the owners of the other 31 teams, and credits him with helping achieve a deal. Green Bay has a unique position, former commissioner Paul Tagliabue told Business Week: “moral purity or economic objectivity. Whatever it is, it is useful.”

Ownership of the Barcelona fútbol club is now limited to family members of current stockholders, while the Wisconsin football team’s shares are open to anyone who has the funds until the current batch of 250,000 sell out—stocking stuffer, anyone? In neither case does owning stock earn you any significant perks, whether financial or even a ticket to games (Lambeau’s season-ticket waiting list runs more than 80,000 names long), which leaves essentially no downside for clubs.

One British group, MyFootballClub, has taken community ownership even further: Since 2008, all player trades and other key decisions for the Ebbsfleet United soccer team have been made based on a vote of stockholders. While such a model would not work on the highest professional level—professional scouts and managers make better decisions than even the most avid fans, Monday morning quarterbacking be damned—it’s refreshing to see that the era of exploring innovative ownership models didn’t die after the Packers were founded in 1919. Having 112,000 owners may not be the main reason the Packers or Barça win all the time, but it’s certainly helping the cause.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Paul Kehrer

The NBA is back following contentious labor negotiations, the NFL has caught up from its own labor strife with a playoff race in full, Tewbotastic effect, and Women’s Professional Soccer could be going nonprofit: It’s an interesting time in sports business. What better way to keep the conversation going than add one of the country’s most famous sports franchises to the list of GOOD Company Project finalists?

Green Bay Packers, Inc.

The Green Bay Packers are one of the NFL’s most storied teams, with legendary players and coaches like Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, and Brett Favre. The team has been to five Super Bowls, winning four—including the first ever played and the most recent contest last year. The current team is undefeated and on pace to contend for the title once again. Like many NFL teams, the Packers maintain an extensive philanthropic effort, donating $2.5 million to nonprofit organizations last year, establishing a foundation dedicated to community development, and participating in the league’s anti-child-obesity campaign. The team was recognized as the best sports franchise in the country by ESPN the Magazine this year. What makes the Packers unique, however, is that they are community-owned and managed, the only team in the NFL that is literally owned by the fans. That allows them to do things other teams can’t, like banning advertising from inside the stadium and keeping ticket prices low. The Packers' latest stock offering, to fund stadium renovations, began this month and could provide a model for other community organizations in need of funding.

Professional sports isn’t necessarily the first place you look for social responsibility, but the mass appeal of leagues like the NFL and NBA make them ideal platforms to promote social impact, from individual athletes taking stands to an example like the Packers’ franchise that shows that non-traditional business practices can compete—in a very literal way—with their profit-focused counterparts. 

According to Joichi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, it’s not a thing, it’s a philosophy. Writing earlier this week, Ito looked back to the earliest days of the internet, when architects attempted to establish a system of uniform standards for their fledgling network in a contest between a bureaucratic standards-organizing body and “a loosely organized group of researchers and entrepreneurs.”

The hackers won with the credo “rough consensus and running code,” establishing the basic rules of the internet we know today. “It was the triumph of distributed innovation over centralized innovation,” Ito concludes.

Today, that spirit is carried on at GOOD Company finalist GitHub, which provides the tools and venue for software developers to collaborate on projects. GitHub, the world’s single largest repository of code, came about in 2007 when a group of engineers wanted to share code over the internet and had to build their own solution.

Based on Git, a program developed by software pioneer Linus Torvalds that makes it easier for multiple developers to work on a single code project, GitHub adds a layer of collaborative tools and stores everything securely online, so developers can access from the next room or the next continent. “The distributed part is the cool futuristic part of GitHub,” co-founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath says. “All you have to do is put your code up there and we’ll do the rest.”

But GitHub has become much more than a place for software developers to collaborate effectively. It’s also helped facilitate the growth of open source code: computer software that anyone can learn use and modify, thus speeding iteration and innovation. Anyone can sign up to use GitHub for free as long as they keep their code open, and the company has opened much of its own code as well. You only pay for GitHub when you want to work on projects privately.

Even companies that want to protect their proprietary software—Twitter, Facebook, Blizzard Entertainment, and Etsy, to name a few—use GitHub to perform public collaborations, either subjecting their code to improvement from a community of smart developers or making available key tools that allow outside developers to build add-ons to their projects. These add-ons, like the games that people play on Facebook or applications that people use to view Twitter, help increase the value of the original product. “What I really love about GitHub is we’re pushing that into a lot of corporations,” Wanstrath says. “There are people who are doing open-source in their free time or at work, and saying they want to work on their company’s software the same way.”

But GitHub’s biggest innovation may be what it’s learning from social media—the company’s tagline, after all, is "social coding," and it's not all business at headquarters, which hosts coder meet-ups and has a popular mascot in the oft-changing Octocat.  “The whole internet is evolving and maturing, we can take ideas from Facebook that help bring friends and families together, and use that on collaboration,” Wanstrath says.

All of the 1.2 million developers who use GitHub have their own profile pages that track their collaborations and facilitate discussions about projects. Coders treat their profiles as resumes, demonstrating their past work to potential employers and co-founders. The company is developing new work processes for the 21st century, as software becomes an increasingly important part of every business. “We built GitHub to make it easier for us to work on open-source with one another," Wanstrath says. "Sometimes I think we’ve done too good of a job: They’re getting too many contributions; another inbox, like their e-mail box, that’s never-ending." “Now it’s like, how do we make GitHub’s interface better to deal with this massive number?”

If the assembly line helped define the industrial revolution a century ago, GitHub’s virtual collaboration arena could become the way we talk about the work processes of the information revolution.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user tollmantim