Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Business Resource Guide: Impact Investing

Barclays’ Impact Series comprises free white papers and PDFs breaking down the latest research in ESGs and impact investing. It is an excellent source of research on investment-grade corporate bonds that match social ESG goals as well as sustainable credit investing

“The platform is much more than a compilation of ESG/SRI lists and rankings. It allows users to sort and evaluate across 20-plus factors, including carbon emissions, human rights, diversity and shareholders’ rights. It’s one of the few platforms that is both rich when it comes to ideas and robust when it comes to tools.”

“The CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing has been working since 2011 to establish a rich set of resources and activities for MBA students, entrepreneurs, investors, funders, academics, policymakers and others to explore and support the field of impact investing over its critical period of development. They are Duke University’s intellectual hub for impact investing, the practice of investing for social and environmental impact as well as financial return.” (See their Resources link.)

Melinda Epler, the CEO of Change Catalyst, has a resource guide with helpful, informative links. It includes guides, case studies, books, videos, articles and more.

This is a global platform where impact investors coalesce to help increase the scale of impact investing.

“This Learning Hub is designed to help you learn more about impact investing either to meet your personal interest or to support your work with clients if you are a professional organisation looking to make impact part of your training courses and materials.”

Coursera Course (Audit for free.)
How can businesses and investors help fill the multi-trillion-dollar gap needed for sustainable development? Simply put: by incorporating sustainability and social impact factors on people and planet into management decisions. Through this course, anyone can learn to improve their organization's practice of impact measurement and management and align their ESG or impact activities and reporting with emerging global standards.

“ESG data vendors such as MSCI provide valuable insight into impact investing. Having an overview of ESG methodology helps clarify the variables one can act on. In practice, financial advisors can partner with a direct indexing provider to deliver a solution that best fits the investor’s goals from both an impact and financial perspective.”

“NextBillion is an open forum for the development through enterprise community. Based at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, we publish original guest-written articles about the opportunities and challenges of doing business in low- and middle-income countries. We also provide a curated newsfeed, events calendar and jobs board.”

“S&P Global provides multiple layers of ESG insight. Financial institutions can leverage its Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA) during the investment process to assess ESG factors. Its financial materiality matrix identifies which ESG factors are likely to have the most significant impact on a company’s business value drivers of growth, cost, risk and, ultimately, future financial performance.”

Investors are increasingly taking into consideration the impact of their investments. A great blueprint for impact is the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Alignment with these goals and their related thematic issues helps impact-oriented investment solutions contribute to positive outcomes that benefit the world