Impact Investing’s Next Challenge

Since the term “impact investing” was coined by the Rockefeller Foundation 15 years ago, the approach has challenged the common narrative that investors must settle for lower returns if they want to bring about change.

But there’s now another major hurdle to the mainstreaming of impact investing: standardising impact measurements to equip investors to make choices that best align with their goals.

“In financial markets, we have a whole infrastructure that allows any investor to make financial comparisons. But to determine impact we don’t yet have the same tools and resources available,” says Sophia Sunderji, research manager at the Global Impact Investing Network, an industry research and analytics nonprofit group.

Much like investors can compare mutual funds with similar styles and objectives, investors should be able to make decisions about investments by comparing impact, Sunderji says.

The challenge is twofold. The first is accurately measuring impact—it can take years for an investment to produce results, and it can be difficult to prove direct cause and effect.

Possibly even more challenging is standardising the data so that one investment’s impact results can be fairly contrasted with another’s.

But the industry is making strides. Sunderji is leading GIIN’s effort to establish a go-to industry resource for due diligence on impact. This involves establishing core metrics for each type of impact goal from infrastructure and education to climate change and ocean pollution. With a combination of industry research and detailed reporting by impact investments, GIIN is crunching the data and quantifying impact.

The objective is to standardize data—using factors relevant to the area of intended impact—on GIIN’s existing database called Iris Plus (IRIS+) to make it easily comparable.

For example, for impact investors who want to help the estimated 1.7 billion adults globally without access to basic financial services, relevant metrics may be how many loans were issued to small businesses in underserved areas or the number of people who accessed financial services for the first time. Such data are finely sliced and diced by factors such as gender, region, asset, or credit size to be more meaningful for comparative purposes.

GIIN’s standardization process also seeks to evaluate future outcomes, Sunderji says. An investor might issue an impressive number of microloans, but how many of their recipients went on to create successful enterprises?

Tools are also evolving to measure the impact of investing in opportunity zones, which were established in 2018 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law provides capital-gains tax incentives for investments in opportunity zones, which are areas identified as economically distressed.

The industry has seen average annual capital growth in the past three years of about 17% to just over $700 billion, driven in part by rising interest among institutional investors. Last year, insurance companies and pension funds each accounted for about 4% of impact capital, up from nearly nil five years ago, according to GIIN.

“Institutional investors are fiduciaries—they are finance-first and impact-second because they can’t

be sacrificing returns,” says Vikram Gandhi, founder and CEO of New Delhi-based VSG Capital Advisors and senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School. “They wouldn’t be investing if they didn’t think they could make market-rate returns.”

A next big driver of capital will be the estimated $40 trillion in wealth that will transfer from baby boomers to younger heirs over the next two decades, Gandhi says, adding that subsequent generations are more than three times more likely to include impact investments in their portfolios.

As tools to measure and compare impact are honed, enabling investors to choose effective investments, it is not just the capital that will be magnified—but its effectiveness in bringing about change.

Could a recession be the best time to launch a tech startup?

A recent study suggests that is the case. The authors found that tech startups that began operations during the 2007-09 recession—and received their first patent in that time—tended to last longer than tech startups founded a few years before or after. And those recession-era companies also tended to be more innovative than the rest.

“The effect of macroeconomic trends is not always intuitive,” says Daniel Bias , an assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, who co-wrote the paper with Alexander Ljungqvist, Stefan Persson Family Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Drawing on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the authors examined a sample of 6,946 tech startups that launched and received their first patent approval between 2002 and 2012.

One group—about 5,734 companies—launched and got their patent outside of the 2007-09 recession. Of those, about 70% made it to their seventh year. But the startups that launched and got their first patent during the recession—about 1,212 companies—were 12% more likely to be in business in their seventh year.

These recession-era firms were also more likely to file a novel and influential patent after their first one. (That is, a patent the researchers determined was dissimilar to patents in the same niche that came before it, but similar to ones that came after it.)

So, why did these recession-era firms outperform their peers? Labor markets played a big role.

A widespread lack of available jobs meant that the startups were able to land more productive and innovative employees, especially in their research and development groups, and then hold on to them. More important, the tight labor markets also meant that the founding inventors—the people named on the very first patent—were more likely to stick around rather than try for opportunities elsewhere.

For startups started during the 2007-09 recession, founding inventors were 25 percentage points less likely to leave their company within the first three years. On average, about 43% of founding inventors in the entire sample left their startup within the first three years.

“Our study really highlights the importance of labor retention for young innovative startups. Retaining founding inventors cannot only help them survive, but also thrive,” Bias says.

Impact Investing’s Next Challenge

There’s now another major hurdle to the mainstreaming of impact investing.

A study suggests that when jobs are hard to come by, the best workers are more available—and stay longer