Blog
Published August 2026 by Gina Dalma and Alison Lingane, originally published in ImpactAlpha
The new economy is already emerging. Investors can build the infrastructure.
New research from PwC cuts against the grain: Companies using AI to augment their workers are outperforming those using it to replace them — with faster headcount growth, higher wages, stronger returns. The companies pulling furthest ahead are amplifying human expertise, not eliminating it.
The finding invites a deeper question that impact investors are uniquely positioned to answer. When technology amplifies human expertise and creates new value, who captures the gains? Right now, the answer is mostly shareholders. But the models for a different answer already exist — and the infrastructure gap that keeps them from scaling is, increasingly, an investment opportunity.
While headlines warn of rising authoritarianism, ecological breakdown and deepening inequality, something quieter, but no less powerful, is also unfolding around the world: Indigenous finance systems, community-centered banks, worker-owned companies, land trusts, and regenerative enterprises demonstrating that markets can operate differently, creating prosperity while strengthening communities and respecting planetary limits.
A constellation of proof points – not yet a system
The new economy is not a theory. We see worker cooperatives thriving in one region. Employee ownership models and land trusts protecting community assets in another. Mission-driven companies redefining corporate purpose elsewhere.
But inspiring examples do not constitute a system.
The challenge is not the absence of alternatives. It is the absence of systems that allow those alternatives to scale until they become the new norm. The current system has stock tickers, global financial institutions and decades of policy alignment reinforcing its dominance. Many of the most promising new economy models, by contrast, are decentralized, locally rooted, and undercapitalized, lacking the connective tissue that would allow them to move from the margins to the mainstream.
Markets are built, not born
History shows that economic systems scale only when a deliberate enabling environment exists. Public policy paired with strategic financing allowed renewable energy to shift from a niche experiment to a global market. Community development finance and microfinance followed the same pattern. Markets did not simply emerge; they were built.
The same is true for the new economy. Moving from scattered innovation to systemic transformation requires connective tissue across four interdependent layers:
- Movement power and catalytic capital like early investment capital, philanthropic first-loss funding and donor mobilization to build political will to make reform possible
- Systems and narrative change that shifts policy and redefines economic success
- Market infrastructure like intermediaries, shared data standards, investor education and capital aggregation vehicles that allow investment to flow at scale
- Ground-level innovation where these businesses and institutions demonstrate what is possible
Capital and policy flow down through these layers; proof points and legitimacy flow up. No layer succeeds alone.
The investment opportunity in infrastructure
This is where impact investors and philanthropic catalytic capital have a role that mainstream markets cannot yet play.
Historically, early capital has helped build the foundations of emerging markets — seeding CDFIs through organizations like Opportunity Finance Network, accelerating microfinance, and underwriting the early infrastructure of community solar. In each case, early capital funded what markets alone would not: shared infrastructure, policy development, field-building organizations, early experimentation. These investments created the conditions for far larger flows of investment capital to follow.
The same opportunity exists today, and it is more urgent. The AI transition is compressing timelines. The ownership question is becoming acute. The decisions being made now about who owns AI-driven productivity will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse. Impact investors who move early to fund new economy infrastructure — the intermediaries, the standards, the policy infrastructure, the movement organizations — are not making charitable bets. They are seeding the conditions for a much larger market.
For impact investors, there are concrete opportunities to deploy capital now. Employee ownership funds offer risk-adjusted returns alongside measurable worker wealth creation. CDFIs and community development loan funds financing community-owned real estate and worker-owned businesses are another access point. And catalytic philanthropic capital — directed at organizations that build narrative power and make the new economy politically viable — can unlock the enabling environment that allows these investment vehicles to scale, including through The Global Fund for a New Economy’s collaborative fund. In other words, philanthropy can help build the scaffolding that allows a new economic paradigm to take hold.
Building across layers
Our two organizations work at different but complementary layers of this ecosystem.
The Global Fund for a New Economy focuses on shifting the rules of the system itself — strengthening the policy frameworks that allow markets to serve people and the planet and supporting the organizing and movement infrastructure needed for lasting change. By convening leaders and channeling resources toward systemic transformation, the organization is rallying donors, policymakers and civic leaders around a shared project: an economy where well-being, ecological balance and shared prosperity define success.
Ownership Capital Lab works to create the enabling environment that allows employee ownership models to scale until they become the new norm — mobilizing investors and addressing the structural barriers that limit capital flows to these businesses. Through stewarding the field’s EO Capital Roadmap and the newly launched EO Fund Accelerator, the Lab is building the connective tissue to enable employee ownership to become a defining feature of the new economy.
Together, these efforts reflect a simple but powerful insight: transforming the economy requires work across multiple layers at once. None of these layers can succeed alone. But when they reinforce one another, the conditions for systemic change begin to emerge.
The future is a design choice
The dominant economic system did not arise by accident. It was built over decades of policy choices, institutional development and coordinated investment. The New Economy will be built the same way.
The encouraging news is that we do not need to invent new models. Many of the solutions already exist — in communities, businesses and institutions demonstrating what a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable economy can look like.
The future of the economy is not predetermined. It will be shaped by the choices we make today about where we invest our capital, our attention and our imagination.
The new economy is already emerging. Now, the task before us is to build the infrastructure that allows it to scale.
Gina Dalma is chief development officer for the Global Fund for a New Economy, a collaborative fund and field-builder for the new economy movement.
Alison Lingane is founder and CEO of Ownership Capital Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to scaling employee ownership as a mainstream private markets investment strategy.