Philanthropies, universities, militaries and other important institutions do not take market value as a metric. Philanthropies value progress against societal problems. Universities value creation, storage and dissemination of knowledge and culture. Militaries value protection of national security. Risk preferences influence the perceived values of risky assets.
Individuals often have highly subjective scales of value.
Some important value scales are embodied in mature concepts of ethics, aesthetics, justice, humanism, and morality. An important observation is that there are some fundamental methods of reasoning about value that are applicable more or less independently of value scale. Multi-attribute utility theory is one example of such a strategic reasoning framework. Thus, many of the most world's most successful organizations take strategic approaches to resource allocation, whether they happen to be optimizing for business value or for other metrics. A key goal of SSD research is to adapt and leverage such ideas to catalyze significant improvements in the intellectual foundations and in the practice of software design and engineering.