This essay uses Bogdanov’s Tektology, or organisational science to compare three forms of organisation: Bourgeois corporation, the Soldier-peasant army and the Exemplary laboratory and their role as competing organisational forms offering market-based, command-based and commons-based approaches to social organisation. Bogdanov’s role as an educational innovator is compared with that of Gustavo Esteva, and both are linked to the exemplary-laboratory organisation as a way of combining learning with the commons. One outcome of Bogdanov’s approach which is featured is that of Vladimir Vernadsky, the Ukrainian bio-geochemist who discovered the role of man and other living creatures in the generation of CO 2 in the atmosphere. This reflects the strengths of Bogdanov’s Tektology as way of approaching sustainability, which at the same time fits with a commons-based innovative approach rooted in a dynamic around autonomy and mutuality. http://www.academia.edu/10149629/Bogdanov_s_Organisational_Science_the_Commo...