How Mainstream Investors can Design Visionary and Pragmatic Impact Investing Strategies

Published by admin at February 3, 2018

1.1 Background of the Mainstreaming Impact Investing Initiative

This report is the sequel to “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Assessment of the Impact Investment Sector and Opportunities to Engage Mainstream Investors”, which set out to provide a realistic assessment of the impact investing approach.1 Informed by over 150 mainstream investors, business executives, philanthropic leaders and policy-makers, that report provides an overview of impact investing activity, identifies factors constraining the acceleration of capital into impact investments and recommends a set of actions that stakeholders can take to move impact investing from the margins to the mainstream.

In the year since the publishing of “From the Margins to the Mainstream”, the impact investing field has continued to develop. Throughout the past three years, the World Economic Forum has convened mainstream and impact investors through interactive workshops and analytical games hosted at the Annual Meeting in Davos in 2012,2 2013,3 and 2014.4 The Forum’s Mainstreaming Impact Investing initiative has also strived to democratize the best practices and lessons learned from active practitioners through its report series “Ideas to Practice, Pilots to Strategy”.5,6

This report explores a refreshed perspective on the long-term viability of impact investing and presents the “Impact Investing Roadmap” – a framework that investors can use to clarify their vision for impact investing, define stages of impact investing activities and identify tactical steps to develop an investment strategy. Those tactical steps include designing an impact investing model, managing issues of organizational change and if desired, engaging with the robust and supportive impact investing ecosystem.

1.2 Structure of this Report

Recognizing that readers will have differing levels of familiarity with the impact investing field, the report is divided into five sections and a conclusion. Sections 1, 2 and 3 introduce the report, contextualize impact investing within the broader universe of sustainable and responsible investing and provide readers with an updated overview of impact investing. Sections 4 and 5 introduce the Impact Investing Roadmap and detail the questions and recommendations referenced above. Readers familiar with impact investing but short on time may choose to skip to these later sections. Specifically, the sections of this report are broken down as follows:

Section 1 outlines the context in which this report has been written and specifies mainstream investors as the primary target audience with secondary audiences including intermediaries, self-identified impact investors, academics and policy-makers. The section also states that the content of this report is intended to help investors determine how to engage with impact investing and to ask the right questions along the journey.

Section 2 describes impact investing as a distinct approach within the broader set of sustainable and responsible investing approaches. Specifically, impact investing intentionally seeks financial returns alongside social and/or environmental returns that are actively measured. This section explores this distinction, concluding that all approaches within the sustainable and responsible investing universe have merit and that experience in any approach can serve as an “on-ramp” toward additional engagement with other approaches. Additionally, the section provides brief examples of impact investments, showing that while many of the most widely-known impact investments involve the financing of socially-focused start-ups through private equity or debt structures, there is a much broader array of impact investing approaches across asset classes.

Section 3 outlines the forces driving interest in impact investing. Since the set of impact investing approaches is still evolving, comprehensive data on asset allocation, risks and returns does not yet exist. However, this section looks at growth in allocations to responsible and sustainable investments in order to illustrate a growing trend among investors to incorporate non-financial considerations in portfolios. Additionally, it examines a set of global economic, demographic and environmental trends that are creating new market opportunities – opportunities that the impact investing approach is poised to seize.

6 Charting the Course Section 4 introduces the Impact Investing Roadmap. The first component of the roadmap involves defining the organization’s vision for impact investing. Recognizing that mainstream investors are a heterogeneous group, a series of questions are proposed that will help an organization clarify this vision based on its unique motivation, organizational context and market goals. The second component of the roadmap involves pursuing stages of impact investing activities. These stages range from evaluating feasibility, to performing sector due diligence, to launching pilot programmes, to institutionalising an impact investing strategy. Based on an organization’s specific and evolving circumstances, these different stages of engagement may be considered and sequenced over time.