When the wonderful team at specialist social consultancy firm Volans approached us with their idea to do a report on the intersection between corporate venturing and impact investing, all of our team at Global Corporate Venturing loved the idea.
In many ways venture capital is often about impact investing, in a broad sense, as it is the activity of providing the rocket fuel of capital to entrepreneurs who often have bold ideas of how to change society through business and technology. Institutionalising this by embracing impact investing is arguably a small variation from the day job for those investing in venturing.
Corporate venturing is perhaps even more suited to more closely align with impact investing, as modern corporations often have commitments to be impactful, and so it made perfect sense to us to look further at this activity. Corporate venturing units also seek to measure both financial return and strategic return, so practitioners will likely be more comfortable with the addition of societal and environmental metrics compared to other purely financially-focused investors.
Given the potential for alignment between corporate venturing and impact investing we are truly excited this report will be presented at our fourth Global Corporate Venturing Symposium in London. The team of Amanda Feldman, Charmian Love and Sasha Afanasieva have done great research, having provided us with the draft copy of their report, and we are very hopeful they will spark and challenge our audience to go above and beyond in their commitments to make an impact. Corporate social venture capital has already had some pioneers, as the Volans team ably document – after the publication of this report it is to be hoped that impact investing will go mainstream in corporate venturing.
Alongside their presentation of the report, we will be running two seminar slots and one panel session on 21 May about corporate social venture capital.
Helping raise interest in this important area has been truly an honor, and we hope that those attending our symposium will share this enthusiasm.