Response to “When Can Impact Investing Create Real Impact?”

Late­ly, it seems, just about every­body is becom­ing an impact investor. “All good,” one might say, for who wouldn’t want to ral­ly behind those who strive to make a dif­fer­ence in the world while imple­ment­ing a com­pelling invest­ment strat­e­gy? The tricky part, as Paul Brest and Kel­ly Born argue in their thought­ful arti­cle, is deter­min­ing what exact­ly that impact looks like and whether its exis­tence bears any con­nec­tion to the invest­ment process attached to it.

After almost 10 years of build­ing our prac­tice of dou­ble-bot­tom­line ven­ture cap­i­tal at DBL Part­ners, we find many aspects of the authors’ con­cep­tu­al frame­work res­o­nant, includ­ing the notion of per­spi­cac­i­ty, the pres­ence or absence of addi­tion­al­i­ty, and the impor­tance of met­rics and non­mon­e­tary benefits.

Read the full arti­cle at the Stan­ford Social Inno­va­tion Review.