“Anyone who will want to enter the field of finance or investment must be conversant in investing for impact. We believe this is the case, even if you are not yet convinced or don’t plan a career focused on this practice of investing.” This is the proposition faculty members Shawn Cole and Vikram S. Gandhi made to the approximately 50 students in the inaugural “Investing for Impact” course launched this past semester in the MBA elective curriculum. [...]

Professor Kash Rangan is a co-founder and faculty co-chair of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative. Read more to learn about his latest research with a new initiative called the Impact Co-Laboratory. [...]

Last week I joined over 550 others from 43 countries at the Global Steering Group Impact Summit in Chicago to discuss the global phenomenon of impact investing. The Global Steering Group (“GSG”) was established in 2015 as the successor to the Social Impact Investment Taskforce, created and empowered by the G8. Its object is to catalyze the impact investing market globally by providing a unified vision of the market potential and empowering, supporting and education country-led efforts. [...]

In early February, HBS co-hosted the second Transformative Impact Summit, in partnership with Bridgespan, a leading Boston area consulting firm focused on the nonprofit sector. The multi-day workshop convened 20 organizations from across the globe to actively engage on how their organizations could make the move from unit impact to systems-impact – in other words, how each organization might transform its business model to truly move the needle in addressing some of society’s most difficult problems. This is an emerging paradigm Bridgespan has termed “transformative scale.” A diverse group of HBS faculty members attended the summit, including: Kash Rangan, Julie Battilana, John Kim, Len Schlesinger, Rosabeth Moss Kantor and Lynda Applegate. [...]

Just over one week ago, a select group of twenty general partners of U.S-based impact investing funds gathered on campus to discuss and debate the challenges and opportunities facing them as a sector and as leaders. The participating funds represented a specific approach to impact investing - private investing to achieve market rate returns and high impact. Social Enterprise Initiative faculty members Shawn Cole, Kash Rangan, Michael Chu and Vikram Gandhi facilitated the multi-day discussion and were joined by fellow HBS faculty Bill Sahlman, Dutch Leonard, Josh Lerner and Andre Perold. [...]