ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the need and value of analytics and discusses how the nonfinancial metrics on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and impact factors can be used along with traditional financial metrics to assess the risks and opportunities of investment decisions made by institutional investors, venture capitalists, and venture philanthropists, as well as business decisions made by corporate managers. It provides an introduction to decision-making models that are relevant to corporate sustainability, public policy analysis, and value management. The chapter introduces the process of conducting a cost-benefit analysis (CBA), including valuation, discounting, impacts of uncertainty, and distributional consequences. It provides a broad assessment of select sustainability systems and analytical tools currently in the market, and describes how to launch and sustain a sustainability information management system (SIMS) to operationalize the data analytics driven decision process to implement the strategy and outperform the peers.
