Worker-owned co-ops would out-compete traditional enterprises by aligning workers' motives with the company's success.
"All the traditional enterprises are in a pickle," said Krish Ramakrishnan, a former general manager at Cisco who now runs Blue Jeans Network, a cloud-based videoconferencing service.
He has already founded three companies, he says, and the two that have done well -- Liontex, a Web site design firm, and Tek, an all-purpose technology consulting firm -- are both traditional enterprises.
Mr. Del Río, a fifth-generation bull breeder who sports a Barbour jacket, has decided to clone Alcalde, marrying cutting-edge genetics with one of Spain's most traditional enterprises.
Google is gaining traction partly because its products have better features; even more important, traditional enterprises have come to accept cloud-based systems, and workers are used to communicating constantly, thanks in part to the habits of "sharing" information over Facebook and Twitter.
If the goal had been to make money, the college would have done better by investing in more traditional enterprises, like shopping malls in Atlanta, said Dr. Dobelle, but doing something to help the neighborhood, he said, would yield more durable dividends.
