The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University earlier this month launched a new program to support impact investing.
Called “CASE i3: The CASE Initiative on Impact Investing,” the initiative was designed to establish resources and activities for students, entrepreneurs, investors, funders and academics focused on this growing segment of the investing community that seeks to generate environmental and social impacts in addition to financial returns.
“This emerging investment strategy, subject of a White House conference in June 2011, has developed as a way to expand the ability of for-profit and some nonprofit ventures to scale their impacts on critical problems such as energy, health and education,” Cathy Clark, a professor at Fuqua and director of CASE i3, said in a statement. “JP Morgan estimates that this market offers the potential for invested capital of $400 billion-$1 trillion and profits of $183-$667 billion over the next 10 years,” she added.
CASE faculty members will collaborate with the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School as part of the program to offer a new course on impact investing in spring 2012, Fuqua reports. They are also writing new related teaching cases and working with practitioners in the field to create new intermediary infrastructures to support entrepreneurs.
Prior to this fall’s launch of CASE i3, CASE has been coordinating global research for nonprofit organization B Lab and its subsidiary, the Global Impact Investment Rating System, which is the first ratings system of impact investing funds.
“One of the critical needs of this emerging field as an academic discipline is high quality data,” Clark said. Together with its partners, CASE has been working to develop a comprehensive global database of the impact objectives and practices of for-profit, privately-owned social ventures and the impact investment funds that invest in them, she added.
“Within strict privacy guidelines, CASE i3 will continue to engage a broad research community in using the national and global data to answer essential questions about how impact investors generate financial returns and social impacts,” Clark said.
In addition to these efforts, CASE i3 also will focus on knowledge development, disseminating knowledge to improve practice, improving readiness and infrastructure and developing the talent pipeline as part of a larger effort to advance the impact investing field.
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