José María Arizmendiarrieta

Worker co-operatives. Arizmendiarrieta, a Basque priest sent to Mondragón in 1941, founded a technical school, and in 1956 five of its former students set up a stove factory owned by its workers, the first of the Mondragon co-operatives. He never owned or ran the businesses; he supplied ideas, training and a co-operative bank to finance them. Mondragon grew into a large federation, though the collapse of Fagor Electrodomésticos in 2013 showed its limits.