Understanding mechanisms in the social investment market: what are venture philanthropy funds financing and how?

Spiess-Knafl, Wolfgang; Aschari-Lincoln, Jessica

doi:10.1080/20430795.2015.1060187

Cited by 33 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(54 reference statements)

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“…Debates persist on the expectations of philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and impact investment (Rivera-Santos et al 2014;UNDP, 2015), the evolving relations between philanthropy and government in the provision of public goods (Jung and Harrow,2015;Valente and Crane, 2010), and the impact and sustainability of these practices (Muthuri et al 2012). It is surprising that the experimentation with venture philanthropy (Van Slyke and Newman, 2006;Spiess-Knafl and Aschari-Lincoln, 2015), corporate philanthropy (Muller et al, 2014;Muthuri, 2008), corporate humanitarian investment (Van Cranenburgh and Arenas, 2014), and responsible investment outside of the South Africa context (Heese, 2007) has received little academic attention and remains an under-studied area. This is in spite of the different ethical, governance, strategic and operational challenges that arise when non-state actors engage in ameliorating societal problems in many African countries with institutional voids.…”

Section: Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Business Ethics in Africa: The Role of Institutional Context, Social Relevance, and Development Challenges

et al. 2019

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Business ethics in Africa, as a field of research, practice, and teaching, has grown rapidly over the last two decades or so, covering a wide variety of topical issues, including corporate social responsibility, governance, and social entrepreneurship. Building on this progress, and to further advance the field, this special issue addresses four broad areas that cover important, under-researched or newly emerging phenomena in Africa: culture, ethics and leadership; business, society and institutions; corruption, anticorruption and governance; and philanthropy, social entrepreneurship and impact investing. In addition to advancing research by addressing some of the imbalances and gaps in the extant literature, this special issue draws attention to indigenous African theories, models and firms. Some challenges facing business ethics, as a field of practice and teaching in Africa, are also highlighted. The paper concludes with a summary of the eight articles in this special issue.

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Section: Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Business Ethics in Africa: The Role of Institutional Context, Social Relevance, and Development Challenges

et al. 2019

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“…that businesses should focus on shareholder value while nonprofits should work on social value, and government should deliver public value" (Barman, 2016, p .1). While controversial, the broad commercialization of the social sector in the last few decades represents a major shift (Edwards, 2008;Spiess-Knafl & Aschari-Lincoln, 2015;Weisbrod, 1998) and a variety of potential partnerships between market actors in the pursuit of social and financial returns.…”

Section: An Emerging Marketplacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…While a generally accepted notion of an impact investee is harder to identify (H€ ochst€ adter & Scheck, 2015), nonprofits and social enterprises, which work to create financial returns under a social mission (Besley & Ghatak, 2017;Katz & Page, 2010), feature prominently in impact investing. As these social enterprises seek funding, governments, charitable foundations, philanthropists, and high net-worth individuals play a role of first mover (Milligan & Sch€ oning, 2011;Spiess-Knafl & Aschari-Lincoln, 2015;Sunley & Pinch, 2012) by providing grants and first-loss capital during early stages of enterprise development. As these social enterprises and socially responsible businesses become financially viable and scale their operations, they have an opportunity to take on larger and somewhat more traditional capital, now referred to as impact investments.…”

Section: An Emerging Marketplacementioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Government, Nonprofit, and Private Facilitation of the Impact Investing Marketplace

Tekula

Andersen

2018

Public Performance & Management Review

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This article examines the public, private, and nonprofit facilitators at play in the growing field of impact investing, explores their roles, and proposes market rationales for their involvement. We identify four types of facilitation in which actors may participate. Enabling, improving, moving, and launching facilitation types are developed, and case examples of each are mapped to this framework. This article is the first step in creating a broader model of the impact investing marketplace, which will assist market actors in identifying the optimal or most efficient investment for both investor and investee. By envisioning the landscape of facilitation, we can begin to imagine the optimal type of facilitation as well as the facilitator best suited to undertake it for a particular investment. KEYWORDS government; impact investing; nonprofit organizations; social enterprise; social finance A large number of actors are now at play in the emerging marketplace of impact investing, which includes among others a multinational group of national governments and local government agencies; nonprofit organizations and foundations; for-profit corporations; asset managers; and institutional investors (Littlefield, 2011; Tekula & Shah, 2016). A growing body of literature examines impact investment as an emerging asset class (Lehner, 2016; Nicholls, Paton, & Emerson, 2015), yet one area with significant theoretical and practical implications that warrants close observation and study is the facilitation of this marketplace. This article examines the facilitators at play in the growing field of impact investing and explores roles and market rationales for their involvement. We propose four facilitation types across a spectrum of the degree to which market and impact goals are already aligned: enabling, improving, moving, and launching. This theory and study contributes to the public administration, public policy, and nonprofit literature in two ways: first, it addresses a gap in the

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“…The inclusion criteria were driven by our research question. Aware of the strong effects of social organizations' characteristics, such as field and region of financing [33,34], and intending to focus on this foundation's scaling approach, we needed cases that were sufficiently comparable in terms of organizational field, phase, and focus-group in a non-western region and for which sufficient data were available.…”

Section: Data Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enabling Effective Social Impact: Towards a Model for Impact Scaling Agreements

Aschari-Lincoln

Jacobs

2018

Sustainability

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Scaling is a critical organizational phase for social organizations: their upfront financial needs increase dramatically. This paper responds—on the basis of initial research on capacity, up-, and deep scaling strategies—to the need for integrated knowledge on financing processes within the context of social organizations’ impact scaling phase. An exploration of a market leader’s processes uncovered both strengths and struggles, which in turn enabled new levels of understanding related to the research question, “How can impact scaling agreements enable effective social impact?” The fact that the financial provider examined in this empirical study lacked alignment in its scaling approach, goals, and reporting processes over time hampered its effectiveness and sustainability. The findings from this qualitative inter-temporal content analysis enable the development of a model for impact scaling agreements. This shows ongoing flows between the provider and recipient of financial and nonfinancial resources and impact information, as well as decision-making and reporting processes. The outcome of researching the question “how can impact scaling agreements enable effective social impact?” was the identification of three success enhancers for effective social impact scaling agreements to enable social impact: (1) Financial provider alignment pre- and per-engagement in terms of expectations with regard to scaling approach and goals; (2) Scaling approach coherence in terms of understanding and acting upon the inter-relatedness and, in fact, mutual dependency between capacity, up-, and deep scaling; (3) Impact reporting alignment of the target group with the financial recipient and the financial provider. This research makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, the pivotal role of internal alignment between mission, strategy, reporting, and decision-making processes is explored; second, the three scaling strategies of capacity, up-, and deep scaling are established as interrelated dimensions of the same phenomenon.

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Understanding mechanisms in the social investment market: what are venture philanthropy funds financing and how?

Cited by 33 publications

References 32 publications

Business Ethics in Africa: The Role of Institutional Context, Social Relevance, and Development Challenges

Business Ethics in Africa: The Role of Institutional Context, Social Relevance, and Development Challenges

The Role of Government, Nonprofit, and Private Facilitation of the Impact Investing Marketplace

Enabling Effective Social Impact: Towards a Model for Impact Scaling Agreements

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