Impact Investing and Inclusive Business Development in Africa: A research agenda

Impact investing aims to create sustainable social and environmental impacts for investee enterprises and communities as well as adequate financial returns. As an attractive emerging market investment strategy, it involves development finance institutions and philanthropic foundations partnering with mainstream private venture capital to create impact funds with the goal of catalysing inclusive market-based enterprise development in low income countries. In this paper, we present findings from a scoping study discussing the nature and operations of impact funds in African economies and the associated research opportunities on this topic. To facilitate the assessment, we reviewed the existing literature on impact investing, considering this along three interrelated perspectives, namely 1) impact investing as development finance policy for economic development, 2) impact investing as a development in socially responsible investing, and 3) impact investing as capacity-building for inclusive business development in African economies. The interplay of these perspectives shapes the constitution and operational strategies of specific impact funds and provide a conceptual context for understanding impact investing at country level. Drawing on interviews, email exchanges and roundtable discussions with representative global and country-specific (Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Kenya) stakeholders our analysis makes three contributions to the impact investing debate. First we explore a model for understanding the ways in which impact funds are being channeled into inclusive businesses in Africa and the associated catalytic effects on poverty alleviation, social and economic development. Second we identified and tested access to, a range of impact funds and associated sector-specific inclusive businesses for future case writing – hopefully ‘failures’ as well as ‘successes’. Finally, we reflect on some of the unanswered managerial and policy-related questions that require a more rigorous inquiry-led appraisal to better understand and enhance the contribution of impact funds to inclusive business development in Africa

A Management Maturity Model (MMM) for project-based organisational performance assessment

Common sense suggests that organisations are more likely to deliver successful projects if they have systems in place that reflect a mature project environment based on a culture of continuous improvement. This paper develops and discusses a Management Maturity Model (MMM) to assess the maturity of project management organisations through a customisable, systematic, strategic and practical methodology inspired from the seminal work of Darwin, Deming, Drucker and Daniel. The model presented is relevant to organisations, such as construction and engineering companies, that prefer to use the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK™ Guide) published by the Project Management Institute (PMI), but without the disadvantages of excessive time and cost commitments and a ‘one size fits all’ approach linked to rigid increments of maturity. It offers a game-changing advance in the application of project-based organisational performance assessment compared to existing market solutions that are unnecessarily complex. The feasibility of MMM is field-tested using a medium-sized data centre infrastructure firm in Tehran

Learning the Lessons of Openness

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has built up a record of experience and achievements since it was formed 10 years ago as an identifiable approach to sharing online learning materials. In its initial phase, much activity was driven by ideals and interest in finding new ways to release content, with less direct research and reflection on the process. It is now important to consider the impact of OER and the types of evidence that are being generated across initiatives, organisations and individuals. Drawing on the work of OLnet (http://olnet.org) in bringing people together through fellowships, research projects and supporting collective intelligence about OER, we discuss the key challenges facing the OER movement. We go on to consider these challenges in the context of another project, Bridge to Success (http://b2s.aacc.edu), identifying the services which can support open education in the future

The Human Capital “Impact” on E-Business: The Case of Encyclopedia Britannica

[Excerpt] The term “New Economy” has been coined to describe the remarkable economic performance of the 1990s. Stiroh, (1999) an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York observes that its defining characteristic is a “focus on increasing globalization and expanding information technology” (pg. 87). Research suggests that revenues from electronic based business to business trade will double over the next five years from $43 billion in 1998 to$1.3 trillion in 2003. Revenues from business to consumer trade are predicted to rise from $8 billion to$108 billion over the same time period (Forrester Research, 1998). However, there is increasing attention to the challenges facing business in the new economy, and an increasing chorus of analysts suggesting how tenuous many of these business models really are. A recent Barron’s article showed that many dot-com companies have only days of remaining cash (Willoughby, March 20, 1999). Such a key emerging phenomenon has not escaped the attention of writers, though the existing body of writing has some important gaps. We would classify existing e-business literature into two groups. First, there is a growing body of literature that discusses the how the Internet is transforming business models and organizational strategies. A second, much smaller body of work has focused on e-HR, or more specifically, the implications of the Internet on various HR practices

Integrating E-Commerce and Data Mining: Architecture and Challenges

We show that the e-commerce domain can provide all the right ingredients for successful data mining and claim that it is a killer domain for data mining. We describe an integrated architecture, based on our expe-rience at Blue Martini Software, for supporting this integration. The architecture can dramatically reduce the pre-processing, cleaning, and data understanding effort often documented to take 80% of the time in knowledge discovery projects. We emphasize the need for data collection at the application server layer (not the web server) in order to support logging of data and metadata that is essential to the discovery process. We describe the data transformation bridges required from the transaction processing systems and customer event streams (e.g., clickstreams) to the data warehouse. We detail the mining workbench, which needs to provide multiple views of the data through reporting, data mining algorithms, visualization, and OLAP. We con-clude with a set of challenges.Comment: KDD workshop: WebKDD 200

Fueling Impact: A Fresh Look at Business Model Innovation and New Revenue Sources

Do you want to know how community foundations are finding innovative new sources of support, and diversifying their revenue base? How new revenue sources strengthen each community foundation's differentiation and sustainability?Difficult economic times in 2008-2010 have been an important wake-up call -- a reminder that diversifying revenue sources is an essential component of a strong business model