Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference [Hardcover]

An insightful, easy-to-digest overview of the burgeoning phenomenon that is impact investing for blended return, described by the authors as "investment strategies that generate financial return while intentionally improving social and environmental conditions." Bugg-Levine and Emerson describe the history and current space of impact investing, noting lessons learned along the way, and identify areas of promise and concern for the future of impact investing.

This is a must-read for current and potential impact investors, social entrepreneurs, the philanthropic community, and policymakers interested in impact investing. I also highly recommend this book to individuals who are simply curious about the topic as it is not only informative, but also an enjoyable read.

Bugg-Levine and Emerson present a history, a contemporary look, and do some promotional forecasting about impact investing. They credit, appropriately and adequately, the decades of innovation from religious endowments to teachers' pension funds the idea of mixing investing with social returns. The simultaneous pursuit of financial return and social value lie at the heart of the tools now known as impact investing and the outcomes now described as blended value. They also credit the "boundary" systems on either side of Impact Investing - philanthropy and commercial finance. In their words:

"Without philanthropy, modern microfinance would not exist. But without ... integration into the global investment system, microfinance would likely not have exceeded so spectacularly ..." (p. 46)

The closing line of the above paragraph then asks the key question for the entire book: "But at what price?" Emerson and Bugg-Levine tackle the costs and losses that have resulted from the decades of experiments that bring impact investing to this moment. Money has been lost, reputations ruined, lives taken. It has not been a straight line to success and the way forward presents no guarantees. Like any good financial discussion, previous outcomes are no guarantee of future results.

The book comes at in important time for impact investors (and for Emerson and Bugg-Levine themselves, both of whom have just taken on new jobs). SoCAP 11, the fourth annual conference that has become almost synonymous with Impact Investing opens this week in San Francisco. The first SoCAP conference launched one month to the day after the 158 year old Lehman Brothers investment bank went bankrupt. The disarray, panic, and anger from that scary time have raised and ruined political careers, redrawn the global map of economic powerbases, and given rise to bestselling books and award winning movies. They've also opened wider the window of opportunity for new concepts of capitalism, new measures of profit, and more widespread conversations about sustainable enterprise.

Bugg-Levine and Emerson tell this story from the inside. Bugg-Levine led a grantmaking portfolio at The Rockefeller Foundation for several years that poured tens of millions of dollars into the infrastructure of impact investing. Emerson has staffed and consulted to several investor-side enterprises over the years. They present the historical roots of the ideas and give numerous examples from across the globe of the roles and permutations of development finance, microfinance, socially responsible investing and philanthropy that merge, as streams into a river and then as rivers into the sea (a favorite metaphor of theirs). Their direct involvement in building and promoting these tools and values are strong credentials for the two authors - and they tell a good story. There is (thankfully) no glorifying or covering up - people they know made mistakes and experiments went wrong. The authors are emphatic to this point, impact investing is not a silver bullet.

For my purposes, the more interesting section of the book comes in part two - what will the future hold? They address this in two ways - the practical and the predictive. They identify several sectors where impact investing opportunities are likely to grow and offer guidance for interested investors to pursue such opportunities.

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A cautiously optimistic book about impact investing both as an (emerging) asset class as well as an approach to portfolio management. It strives to bridge the silos between the social sector practitioners and the financial capital markets players without taking ideological positions for or against each side.

For the finance types, this is not a how-to book on impact investing as it does not focus on the pricing and valuation methodologies, rather it's more of a framework for approaching investing that incorporates social objectives into an entire asset management portfolio.

For the social sector practitioners, it's a great primer to help un-demonize the financial markets' role and its potentially huge contribution to the impact investing space and the social sector, if framed appropriately.

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