"Impact investments are investments intended to create positive impact alongside financial return. Over the past few years, traditional investors have been increasingly interested by the nascent impact investment market and in 2010, the Global Impact Investing Network ("GIIN"), the Rockefeller Foundation and J.P. Morgan collaborated on a piece of research titled "Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class", which examined the market landscape, the characteristics of investments, and the size of potential investment opportunities.

This year, the GIIN and J.P. Morgan have partnered on an expanded survey, capturing data on over 2,200 private transactions totaling over USD 4bn of investment. In complement to this investment survey, we also surveyed investor views on investment philosophy and the overall development of the sector. The 2011 survey returned data from a broader and more geographically diverse pool of respondents. The questions explore returns, risk and impact measurement practices in more depth and also gauge general market perceptions."

"We are pleased to share with the impact community our review of 150 impact investing platforms, networks and organizations that promote, support or convene investors in the impact finance area. Prompted by our own experience as investors, technologists, and system designers, we were interested in better understanding prevailing business models and motivations for sharing (or hoarding!) data, innovations, and investors. Our analysis builds on ongoing work to design and develop an interoperable, global, modular, distributed, and democratic infrastructure for mobilizing data, innovations, and capital at the volume and velocity required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Our purpose, in addition to providing an overview of the platform landscape, is to identify opportunities for alignment of prospective partners, around the strategy, design and implementation for such global impact infrastructure; and explore scenarios for collective action."

"Drawing on available academic literature and policy evaluation studies, the report aims to identify the impact of public support through equity instruments on firm performance, and puts forward main lessons on policy design and implementation. It employs a mixed- method approach based on evaluation synthesis (Edler at al. 2008)."

"O capítulo andino e o capítulo brasileiro criaram um relatório em conjunto que fornece uma visão geral do setor de inclusão financeira na América Latina, com foco no México e no Brasil. O relatório inclui um infográfico do cenário da inclusão financeira nos dois países, usando fatos e números apresentados ao longo de nossas reuniões e mesas-redondas do Learning Lab de Métricas.

Além disso, o relatório apresenta 3 tópicos relevantes sobre inclusão financeira: produtos e serviços financeiros centrados no usuário, infraestrutura necessária para acesso aos serviços financeiros e educação financeira. Cada tópico oferece uma introdução por especialistas e estudos de caso de diversos projetos na América Latina."

"This study explores how the social entrepreneurship ecosystem can unite to develop an action plan on gender lens incubation and investing for enterprises focused on the low income market segment in India. It takes an international perspective with a geographical focus on India an emerging leader in innovation for the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) and is supported by examples of such innovative high impact, sustainable enterprises."

"This research note asserts that impact investment, which is intended to create positive social or environmental impact beyond financial return, constitutes a new asset class. The report also includes the first large-scale data analysis of return expectations from more than 1,000 impact investments and compares them to established benchmarks for emerging and developed market debt and equity returns. We hope this report helps to advance a broader understanding of impact investing as an appropriate and economically effective way to complement government and philanthropy in solving the world's greatest problems at scale."

"Unitus Seed Fund has published a guide that has combined the methodology and approach the organization applied to designing to an impact measurement framework and consists of templates by sector for multiple types of businesses that can be downloaded for use."

"The following document presents five case studies to demonstrate how a diverse group of organizations have developed sound impact measurement practices, including how the seven guidelines are being applied in the organization, as well as the organization’s impact measurement practices, the contextual factors that shaped their impact measurement approach, how they involved key stakeholders along the way, and key “impact measurement lessons.” These case studies – which are highly diverse in nature – aim to help investors and investees translate the seven guidelines for impact measurement into an impact measurement approach that is right for them."

"This handbook provides investors, businesses and private sector development practitioners with an overview of tools and methods for effective and appropriately tailored data collection for impact measurement and management. It builds on the recognition that the methods of larger, independent impact evaluations of, for example, government-funded programmes rarely lend themselves well to a private sector context. In reviewing select private sector-relevant tools and methods, it draws out how such tools can deliver impact insights while often feeding valuable business intelligence back into companies."

"I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to "pure" philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants and when financed by investments. The analysis yields two heuristics to guide impact investors. First, investments allow a financier to discipline inefficient spending. Second, investments may enable a social enterprise to exploit new opportunities for profit and may increase the enterprise's scale relative to when grant financed. I quantify these heuristics for the case of Husk Power, a social enterprise that has received impact investment."