Flourishing Business Community
Speakers Series: Stories from the Field #21
The Practice of Flourishing – Entrepreneurial Insights into Value Co-creation and Systems Change with Ondine Hogeboom
| Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2025 |
| 15h00 UTC – 08h00 PST, 11h00 EST, 15h00 BST, 16h00 CET, 00h00 JST To convert UTC to your timezone, click here |
| Duration: 1 hour |
| Registration: Required via Eventbrite at bit.ly/SFF21-Register |
For our twenty first monthly flourishing business community speaker series: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome back Ondine Hogeboom from Flourishing Startups in Montréal Canada.
Join us to explore how the next generation of entrepreneurs is transforming business as a force for flourishing:
- Design regenerative business models
- Foster stakeholder co-creation
- Navigate the tensions of value co-creation and co-destruction
- Build motivation and well-being through collective impact
Ondine is a ground-breaking leader in our community and co-founder of Flourishing Startups. She works around the world with entrepreneurs and the people and organizations that support them – applying the Flourishing Business Canvas within a methodology she co-developed – the Flourishing Startup Method.
In her talk Ondine will focus on the question: what does it take for a startup to design for flourishing – of people, communities, and the planet?
Whether you’re a changemaker, educator, or enterprise leader, this session will offer a powerful look at how flourishing frameworks can reorient entrepreneurship toward equity, regeneration, and long-term systems transformation, while also revealing the tensions and supports needed to realize their full potential.
She will present early findings from an international research study conducted in partnership with Halmstad University, Sweden. The study explores how startups are putting the principles of the Flourishing Startup Method (FSM) and the Flourishing Business Canvas (FBC) into practice to move beyond weak sustainability and toward systemic, regenerative, and justice-centred enterprise design.
Amid growing concerns about greenwashing and the limitations of traditional sustainability approaches, the concept of sustainable flourishing offers a bold alternative. Tools like the FSM and FBC provide structured pathways to embed systems thinking, stakeholder co-design, value co-creation, and awareness of value co-destruction into the heart of business models. Yet until now, little empirical research has examined how entrepreneurs actually engage with these tools in practice.
This talk will share key insights from in-depth interviews with startup entrepreneurs who participated in Flourishing Startup programs across Canada and Europe between 2018 and 2024.
During her talk Ondine will highlight:
- How the flourishing business approach deepens systems thinking and helps founders connect personal values with business visions and stakeholder needs?
- How co-creative and relational practices increase motivation and well-being, especially within communities of like-minded entrepreneurs?
- What barriers stand in the way of flourishing, from stakeholder misalignment to limited awareness of value co-destruction and the challenges of moving from theory to implementation?
- What does Flourishing Startups gain from participating in the Flourishing Business Community and what does Flourishing Startups offer to the community?
At the end of her talk Ondine will take questions from members of the community.
After the event, a video of the talk plus slides will be shared in the “Speaker Series” space of the Flourishing Business Community. Please join other flourishing business leaders and become a full member to access.
About Flourishing Startups
Flourishing Startup’s vision is to enable the possibility for people, all life, to flourish. Flourishing Startups was founded in 2015 by Ondine Hogeboom and Antony Upward with the mission of enabling the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders. Flourishing Startups seeks to equip innovators, entrepreneurs and change-makers with the competencies for them to realize enterprises that enable flourishing in their communities. These are enterprises that are socially beneficial, environmentally regenerative and economically viable.
Flourishing Startups works with diverse community-based organizations, academic institutions, youth organizations and entrepreneurship enablers (incubators, accelerators etc.) in Canada, Europe and Southern Africa. Our focus is business model design, the early stages of startups, and women’s entrepreneurship.
Flourishing Startups takes a strongly science-backed, evidence-based and human-centered approach. Our programming integrates a new generation of methods – the Flourishing Startup Method, with tools such as the Flourishing Business Canvas, while developing competencies that enable leaders to build impact-driven and resilient initiatives, enterprises and projects. Our approach is based on ten years of research and testing and is the subject of multiple peer-review publications.
About the Speaker
Ondine Hogeboom (she/her) is a settler in Canada and resides on the unneeded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke (named by settlers as Montréal, Québec, Canada). Prior to starting Flourishing Startups, Ondine started seven successful social enterprises in Southern Africa. Ondine has co-developed the Flourishing Startup Method, a ground breaking framework supporting flourishing startup design and runs a micro-certified global train-the-trainer and community of practice focused on applying the methodology. Ondine has coached over 300 entrepreneurs and had over 8000 startups in 14 countries attend programs she has designed. She has worked with the European Union’s Climate-KIC as a lead expert in Flourishing business model design, is a fellow at the Georgian College Research & Innovation and Entrepreneurship (RIE) Centre, and works with universities, colleges and startup-support institutions all over the globe. Ondine is the author of Lean Startup for Social Enterprise, holds an MBA and is a certified coach and Mindfulness facilitator.