Publications

August 2022 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Evaluating the Impact of Hillside Harvest

By: Archie L. Jones, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein

In fall 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team had just finished their last round of due diligence on the BIPOC-founded premium hot sauce company Hillside Harvest. They thought the business had a fine performance, showing potential to grow into a successful... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Food; Food and Beverage Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States; Massachusetts

September 2018 (Revised June 2019)
Case

THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS: Selecting Impact Funds

By: Vikram Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Nathaniel Schwalb

After much internal debate, THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS of Denmark have decided to allocate a small percentage of their investment portfolio to impact investments. Cambridge Associates, one of the leading investment advisory firms in the world, has been engaged to assist... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Mission-Related Investing; Foundations; Investment; Venture Capital; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategy; Investment Funds; Decision Making; Consulting Industry; Financial Services Industry; Denmark; Europe

2015
Case

Advanced Leadership Pathways: Howard Fischer, Eric Jacobsen, and Gratitude Railroad's Impact Investing

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Daniel Lennox-Choate

In 2013, Howard Fischer (hedge fund founder) and Eric Jacobsen (serial entrepreneur and private equity investor) established Gratitude Railroad as a community of impact investors in nine different "tracks." Each track represented a different concept for using... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Environmental And Social Sustainability; Social Change; Sustainable Business And Innovation; Investment; Social Issues; Environmental Sustainability; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Leadership; United States

2021
Working Paper

Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Enterprises

By: Benjamin N. Roth

I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to “pure” philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants, and when financed by investments. Impact... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Mathematical Methods

SSRN

Read Now

September 2021 (Revised October 2021)
Case

Dream: Impact Through Real Estate

By: Michael Chu and John Masko

The Canadian city of Toronto had one of the largest housing affordability problems of any city in the developed world. One company trying to address this problem was Dream, one of the largest real estate groups in Canada. In 2021, Dream had just launched a new system... View Details

January 2013
Case

Omidyar Network: Pioneering Impact Investment

By: Michael Chu and Lauren Barley

Omidyar Network, having deployed to date over $500 million in ways ranging from donations to commercial equity capital, must decide whether to back Anudip, an Indian organization dedicated to providing the rural unemployed and marginalized with livelihoods linked to... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Social Entrepreneurship; Investment; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; India

2021
Working Paper

Studying the U.S.-Based Portfolio Companies of U.S. Impact Investors

By: M. Diane Burton, Gurveen Chadha, Shawn A. Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Laura Kelley, Josh Lerner, Jaime R. Diaz Palacios, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the reliance on market-based solutions to social and environmental problems around the world (Barman 2016; Horvath and Powell 2020). The growth of impact investing is a vivid example of this trend and, although there have... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Impact Portfolio Companies; Investment; Social Issues; Environmental Sustainability; Investment Portfolio; Business Ventures; Analytics and Data Science; Performance; United States

Read Now

2024
Working Paper

What Do Impact Investors Do Differently?

By: Shawn Cole, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth

In recent years, impact investors – private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns – have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the... View Details

Keywords: ESG; Socially Responsible Investing; Investment Decisions; Public Goods; Impact Investment; Investment; Private Equity; Venture Capital

SSRN

Read Now

2007
Report

Compounding Impact: Mission Investing by U.S. Foundations

By: Mark R. Kramer and Sarah E. Cooch

If foundations are to achieve their lofty ambitions for social impact, they must find creative ways to use every resource they possess. Enter mission investing (now more popularly called impact investing), a practice of using financial investments as tools to achieve a... View Details

Keywords: Foundations; Mission Investing; Impact Investing; Organizations; Mission and Purpose; Investment

September 3, 2020
Article

How to Measure a Company’s Real Impact

By: Ronald Cohen and George Serafeim

Impact transparency will reshape capitalism. By shifting the pursuit of profit away from negligently creating problems to purposefully creating valuable solutions for the world, it will redefine success, so that its measure is not just money, but the positive impact we... View Details

Keywords: Impact; Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; Impact Investment; Impact Investment Funds; Accountability; Accounting Information; Corporate Performance; Sustainability; Social Impact; Capitalism; Accounting; Corporate Accountability; Performance; Measurement and Metrics; Social Enterprise; Society

July 2019
Supplement

Omidyar Network's Investment Decisions: MicroEnsure and Lenddo

By: Vikram S Gandhi

A team of investors at Omidyar Network explore two different investment possibilities in the budding financial inclusion space using their investment framework to consider capital alternatives available for both investments, each of which carries highly divergent... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Micro Finance; Investment; Investment Return; Investment Activism; Investment Portfolio; Microfinance; Decision Choices and Conditions; India; Philippines

September 26, 2024
Article

A Better Way to Measure Social Impact

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Constance Spitzer

All impact investors report the financial returns from their funds and investments, and many provide metrics on intended social outcomes, such as numbers of individuals served, or quality jobs created. But investors do not supply metrics about their impacts on... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Social Impact Investment; Inclusive Growth; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability

February 2012 (Revised July 2012)
Background Note

The Promise of Impact Investing

By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Sarah Appleby and Laura Moon

This note outlines the segments of a potential $500 billion social investment market; sectors such as housing, microfinance, health and education. The note sketches the roles of the various players and summarizes their investment perspectives. View Details

Keywords: Investment

February 2019 (Revised October 2019)
Teaching Note

The Rise Fund: TPG Bets Big on Impact

By: Vikram S Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Sarah Mehta

Teaching Note for HBS No. 318-041. View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; Equity; Investment; Measurement and Metrics; Financial Services Industry; San Francisco

22 Apr 2024
Research & Ideas

When Does Impact Investing Make the Biggest Impact?

The idea of supporting social change has propelled impact investing assets to more than $1 trillion. But what if those funds aren’t as impactful as investors expect? Recent... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

August 2022 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Boston Impact Initiative: Investing in Local Change

By: Emily R. McComb, Amy Klopfenstein and Mel Martin

In fall 2021, Aliana Piñeiro, impact director at Boston Impact Initiative (BII) discovered that an entrepreneur the organization was considering for an investment had failed to disclose pre-existing debt with another lender. Although the business scored highly on BII’s... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Relationships; Business and Community Relations; Society; Social Issues; Wealth and Poverty; Wealth; Poverty; Risk Management; Financial Services Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston

2007
Report

Aggregating Impact: A Funder's Guide to Mission Investment Intermediaries

By: Mark R. Kramer and Sarah E. Cooch

Despite the wide range of impact investment intermediaries that are available and the advantages they can offer, many funders remain unaware of this growing trend to deliver both social impact and financial returns. This study from 2007 provides an overview of these... View Details

Keywords: Financial Intermediaries; Foundations; Impact Investment; Development Economics; Mission and Purpose; Investment; Strategy

September 2024
Case

Myeloma Investment Fund

By: Kyle Myers and Scott Sawaya

This case explores a critical decision facing the Myeloma Investment Fund (MIF) as it evaluates two investment opportunities aimed at accelerating a cure for multiple myeloma.

The MIF, a venture philanthropy fund, must choose between two distinct paths. One... View Details

Keywords: Venture Philanthropy; Biomedical Research; Investing For Impact; Innovation ＆ Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Science-Based Business; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Decision Making; Health Care and Treatment; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

June 2020
Teaching Note

Generation Investment Management

By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Sarah Mehta

This teaching note provides guidance for teaching the case “Generation Investment Management” (820-033), which looks at the challenges facing a sustainable investment firm. View Details