Partnership and collaboration are the keys to building businesses that create positive outcomes for corporations and the wider society, according to Charmian Love, co-founder and director of Corporate Impact X, a corporate venturing project aimed at supporting such investments.
Love moderated a panel featuring four speakers: Julia Rebholz, sustainability director and managing director for energy provider Centrica’s impact investment fund, Ignite Social Enterprise; Jean Christophe Laugée, Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, and Ali El Idrissi.
Through its network of partnerships, Centrica’s £10m ($15m) Ignite fund has generated over £10m worth of revenue since its launch in December 2013, and its projects have benefited more than 10,000 people in the UK, Rebholz said.
Initiatives funded by Ignite include Midlands Together, which employs ex-offenders for energy efficiency refurbishments in houses that would otherwise remain in poor condition, with the houses then sold to fund more projects.
Strong partnerships are important not just in the early stages of impact investing, but also in the later stages, said Laugée, vice-president of nature and cycles sustainability at food producer Danone.
Danone’s most recent initiative, launched in February 2015, is the €120m ($135m) Livelihoods Fund for Family Farming (Livelihoods 3F), co-funded by confectionary producer Mars, which aims to help smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“After 10 years, we are on our way from small-scale [investing] to a mainstream initiative,” Laugée said of Livelihoods 3F. Having a solid partnership matters since going mainstream is a “big challenge; scaling up is putting tension on value from an economic, environmental and social standpoint,” he added.
El Idrissi, vice-president of social finance and impact investing at financial services firm JP Morgan Chase, said finding the right partner is a critical piece of the impact investment puzzle, explaining: “We identify a partner, whether it is a corporate or government or a foundation that says ‘We want to do things differently’.”
The right corporate partner understands that there is a “business imperative, and not only a moral one, in taking the best skills we have, and the best employees, and applying strategic guidelines to penetrate new markets,” El Idrissi said, adding that JP Morgan has allocated $100m to an impact investment fund that has invested fully in the past five years.
Boggs Davidsen is manager of the Knowledge Economy Unit at the Inter-American Development Bank’s Multilateral Investment Fund. The 20-year old fund has invested some $250m, seeding more than 66 venture capital funds in 21 countries, and Boggs Davidsen said the fund is boosting its impact investing activities.
“Today we really do see an interesting convergence of business investment and the development [aid] world coming together in new and different partnerships that would not have existed even a couple of years ago,” she said.