Business Models for Sustainable Finance: The Case Study of Social Impact Bonds

Business models for sustainability (BMfS) are relevant topics on research agendas, given their orientation toward sustainability issues. However, traditional versions of these models are often ill-equipped at solving complex social problems. Cross-sector partnerships for sustainability (CSPfS) have been recognized as a new paradigm that mitigates the failure of traditional models. Impact investing, and social impact bonds (SIBs) in particular, represent an interesting field of research in innovative business models for sustainable finance, even though the literature does not consider SIBs within this broader field. We propose an exploratory study based on qualitative methods aimed at conceptualizing SIBs within the framework of BMfS and understanding how SIB collaboration varies across social sectors and geographical areas. Our study identifies three different models of SIBs characterized by the different degrees of collaboration between actors: (i) SIB as a fully collaborative partnership; (ii) SIB as a low-collaborative partnership; and (iii) SIB as a partially collaborative partnership. Our findings are useful to policy makers and practitioners involved in the SIB design, suggesting that a fully collaborative SIB model may stand a better chance of achieving the expected social impacts

Double Bottom Line Project Report: Assessing Social Impact in Double Bottom Line Ventures

This tool expresses costs and social impacts of an investment in monetary terms. Quantification is achieved according to one or more of three measures: NPV (the aggregate value of all costs, revenues and social impacts discounted), benefit-cost ratio (the discounted value of revenues and positive impacts divided by discounted value of costs and negative impacts) and internal rate of return (the net value of revenues plus impacts expressed as an annual percentage return on the total costs of the investment)

Double Bottom Line Progress Report: Assessing Social Impact in Double Bottom Line Ventures, Methods Catalog

Outlines methods for social entrepreneurs and their investors to define, measure and communicate social impact and return in early-stage ventures

Enhancing the Impact of Cross-Sector Partnerships. Four Impact Loops for Channeling Partnership Studies

This paper addresses the topic of this special symposium issue: how to enhance the impact of cross-sector partnerships. The paper takes stock of two related discussions: the discourse in cross-sector partnership research on how to assess impact and the discourse in impact assessment research on how to deal with more complex organizations and projects. We argue that there is growing need and recognition for cross-fertilization between the two areas. Cross-sector partnerships are reaching a paradigmatic status in society, but both research and practice need more thorough evidence of their impacts and of the conditions under which these impacts can be enhanced. This paper develops a framework that should enable a constructive interchange between the two research areas, while also framing existing research into more precise categories that can lead to knowledge accumulation. We address the preconditions for such a framework and discuss how the constituent parts of this framework interact. We distinguish four different pathways or impact loops that refer to four distinct orders of impact. The paper concludes by applying these insights to the four papers included in this special issue

Franchising as a Strategy for Combining Small and Large Group Advantages (Logics) in Social Entrepreneurship:A Hayekian Perspective

This article develops a Hayekian perspective on social franchising that distinguishes between the end-connected logic of the small group and the rule-connected logic of the big group. Our key claim is that mission-driven social entrepreneurs often draw on the small-group logic when starting their social ventures and then face difficulties when the process of scaling shifts their operations toward a big-group logic. In this situation, social franchising offers a strategy to replicate the small group despite systemwide scaling, to mobilize decentrally accessible social capital, and to reduce agency costs through mechanisms of self-selection and self-monitoring. By employing a Hayekian perspective, we are thus able to offer an explanation as to why social franchising is a suitable scaling strategy for some social entrepreneurship organizations and not for others. We illustrate our work using the Ashoka Fellow Wellcome

A game theory of organizational ecology : a model of managerial inertia and market selection

This paper merges two theoretical perspectives in a mathematical game model: industrial organization on the one hand, which basically is the economic theory of market competition and firm strategies, and organizational ecology on the other, which is a major sociological tradition that studies the evolution of organizational populations. The merger is instrumental in analyzing a key question in organization studies: what is the role of flexibility, inertia and efficiency in facilitating firm performance in a selection environment, in terms of both profitability and survival? Particularly, we argue that game theory can offer a mathematical model of organizational ecology. Such a game-theoretic model reveals that an inert firm may push a flexible rival from the market, even if the inert market leader faces a cost disadvantage. Moreover, this may happen in a munificent environment. That is, cut-throat rivalry can be the result of strategic competition only - being facilitated by organizational inertia. This paper operationalizes relative inertia by modeling managerial resistance against downsizing. The model clearly supports the key claim of organizational ecology that relative inertia facilitates rather than impedes survival chances.industrial organization ;

Nonprofit/For-Profit Status and Earning Differentials in the Japanese At-home Elderly Care Industry: Evidence from Micro-level Data on Home Helpers and Staff Nurses

In April 2000, Japan embarked on a reform of its health care market. Along with the introduction of the long-term care insurance scheme, the government for the first time allowed for-profit operators to compete head-on with non-profit operators in the provision of at-home care services. Taking advantage of a unique and rich micro-level survey, this study is the first to examine wage differentials between the nonprofit and the for-profit sector in Japan's nursing care industry, concentrating on home helpers and staff nurses. Controlling for nonrandom unobserved selection biases, our results show that a nonprofit wage premium exists. This finding supports the hypothesis that nonprofit providers operate under non-distributional constraints.Japanese long-term care insurance, long-term care, nursing home, home helpers, staff nurses, nonprofit wage premium, quality of care, Heckman's two-stage approach

ACCESS: An Inception Report

Imagine a world in which all groups of citizens coming together to realize some public benefit measure and communicate the character and consequences of their work. Imagine further that all those groups have adopted a common reporting system that enables their individual reports to be compared, thus creating powerful descriptions of the relative and collective performance of citizen association for public benefit. Imagine, too, that this common measuring and reporting carries across to all forms of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. This is the world envisioned by ACCESS.For the past 18 months a growing number of concerned actors have been meeting, studying, and testing opinion around one of the great structural weaknesses in the world's institutional infrastructure -- inefficient and weak social investment markets. This inception report sets out the results of this enquiry in the form of a proposal to establish a reporting standard for nonprofit organizations seeking to produce social, environmental and, increasingly, financial returns. The ACCESS Reporting standard is one important contribution to redressing a major global system weakness, but it is certainly not the only one. Nor is it one that can operate in isolation from other initiatives. Accordingly, the ACCESS proposed plan of work involves convening a global dialogue on NGO transparency, accountability and performance with the objective of promoting ACCESS and other practical solutions to the challenges of social investment and civil society accountability.This report sets out the background and rationale for these proposals. You will meet the ACCESS sponsors and pilot project partners. Parts of the report are descriptive and analytical but other parts are necessarily theoretical and technical in nature. We make no apology for this. Part of the reason that in 2003 the world does not yet have a reporting standard for social actors is that the theory and technique have not been mastered. For those with a strong orientation toward strategy and action, however, these aspects are presented as well

Management as a system: creating value

Boston University School of Management publication from the 1990s about the MBA programs at BU, aimed at prospective MBA students