ABSTRACT
This chapter explores if, when, and how investment has impact. It describes what investment means to capital providers in the civic, public, and private sectors. The chapter considers a model for evaluating any kind of investment and discusses a couple case studies. It talks about a wide range of investments in the native language of investors; more importantly, the leaders should be able to talk in plain English about investing for impact. Different investors made vastly different returns on their investment in Google because they took very different kinds of risk. The seed and venture investors made a return of hundreds or even thousands of percentage points on their investments. Impact investments have four core characteristics that mark them as impact investments: Intentionality, Investment with return expectations, Return expectations are relevant to the investment’s asset class, and Impact measurement. Impact investing is approaching its fulcrum moment.
