Diagram: Heliogenesis, 2026

A better material changes very little if the same owner captures the gain from it. Efficiency in an extractive structure produces more extraction, faster. This is the oldest observation in the field and it is still routinely ignored.

So the second vector asks a different question: who holds the thing once it works. Seventeen entries in the catalogue answer it in practice rather than in theory. None of them is a proposal, a pilot, or a paper. Every one is an operating economy with published accounts, and several are older than most of the people arguing about whether such structures can work at scale.

Mondragon in the Basque Country is a federation of about ninety cooperatives with seventy thousand worker-owners, its own bank, and its own university. Emilia-Romagna in Italy runs roughly eight thousand cooperatives that produce a third of regional output. Quebec counts more than eleven thousand social economy enterprises. Kerala devolved a third of its state budget to twelve hundred local governments. The Maori economy in New Zealand holds assets in the order of one hundred and twenty billion dollars.

The Preston model is the smallest and the most copyable. A city redirected seventy-five million pounds of institutional buying to suppliers inside its own boundary, and watched the employment number move.

Each of these keeps the return where the risk sits. That single rule produces most of the observed behaviour. A worker-owned firm does not move a plant to a cheaper country, because the owners live beside the plant. A cooperative bank does not sell its loan book, because the depositors are the shareholders. Sardex in Sardinia lets four thousand businesses trade with each other in a mutual credit unit, so a local recession does not become a local cash drought.

The Swiss WIR bank has run a complementary currency for its members since 1934, through a depression, a war, and every crisis since. Economists have measured it doing something useful: turnover in the WIR unit rises when the franc economy contracts. That is a stabiliser, built by small firms, running quietly for ninety years while the debate about whether such a thing is possible continued elsewhere.

We include this vector because a technology catalogue without it would be dishonest. If the grown cement, the fungal panel, and the local energy plant all end up owned from far away, the region has changed its supplier and nothing else. Ownership is not a soft topic sitting beside the engineering. It decides what the engineering is for.

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