Investing with an Impact: Moving Business Beyond Profits

“Impact Investing” is an emerging concept that focuses on developing a common ground between capital investment and philanthropy. This relatively new theory of social entrepreneurialism focuses on creating positive social impacts while also maintaining an economic commitment to investor returns. This innovative concept has been notably championed by Credit Suisse as well as other financially based institutions and NGO’s. The purpose of this paper is to explore and address the defining factors within the developing and growing field of Impact Investment. The increased effort by business towards moving beyond standard methods of Corporate Responsibility has resulted in the catalyzed formation of new methods to achieving sustainable business on an international level. This paper will take a look the historical factors that have lead to the standardization of the sustainable development movement that is central to the notion of Impact Investment. From this platform, this paper will attempt to identify the foundation for the Impact Investment field as a concept derived from the fusion of venture capital Core Business models and social impact Philanthropic models. This paper will look to understand various sustainable business models to achieving Impact Investment. Furthermore, collaboration between the public sector and private sector has become viewed as necessary for social, environmental, and economic impact. This paper will take a look at the abilities and skills the public and private sectors can provide to a collaborative effort towards social enterprise in the developing world. Next, this paper will look to identify the major themes within Impact Metrics and the effectiveness of attempting to measure the arbitrary concepts of social and environmental impact. This paper will then discuss the prevalent and complicating challenges Impact Investor actors must realize, address, and overcome to attain impact. Finally, this paper will look towards the future of Impact Investment and the direction it must take to maximize the effectiveness of all defining factors. Impact Investment is an exciting and inspiring business concept that is working to prove that the difference between profit maximization efforts and philanthropy is not as great as once was thought

Visual and verbal processing in reasoning

This programme of research, involving seven experiments, investigates Evans' (1980a; 1980b) revised version of the Dual Process theory of reasoning (Wason and Evans, 1975). A Type 2 process is characterised as verbal-rational and a Type I process as non-verbal and non-logical. Evans links the processes to two statistical components of observed reasoning performance. The Type I process reflects non-logical response biases and the Type 2 process reflects attention to the logical nature of the task. Six experiments employ a concurrent articulation (with or without a short-term memory load) methodology devised by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) for investigating their Working Memory model. Four experiments apply this technique to conditional reasoning tasks in an attempt to disrupt the verbal Type 2 process. Some weak evidence for the revised Dual Process theory is found. There is a tendency, marked in only one experiment, for concurrent articulation to inhibit logical performance, whilst having little effect on response biases. Unexpectedly, articulation conditions (without memory load) are characterised by faster responding than silent conditions. The results are inconsistent with Hitch and Baddeley's (1976) data and several features of their Working Memory model. Two further experiments repeat and extend their work. A number of important theoretical implications are discussed in the light of recent revisions to their theory (eg. Baddeley, 1983). A possible connection is drawn between Type I and Type 2 processes and dual memory codes (Paivio, 1971; 1983) and thought systems (Paivio, 1975) of a verbal and visual nature. The hypothesis that Type I processes may be associated with visual mechanisms is tested by introducing a factor into three experiments to induce use of a visual code. This does not affect the Type 1 process but facilitates lo3ical performance. These results are discussed in relation to the revised Dual Process theory. An explanation in terms of a recent tricoding model for processing of pictures and words (Snodgrass, 1980; 1984) is suggested.Science and Engineering Research Counci

Effective support for victims of sexual violence: A systematic review of reviews

In response to the growing body of research on the effectiveness of support for sexual violence victims, numerous reviews have been conducted to synthesise the treatment outcome literature. However, these reviews have also become unmanageable in number and vary in scope or quality, which would make it difficult to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of a specific type of support or intervention. Conducting a ‘review of reviews’ is the next logical step as a way to condense and identify pertinent findings from a large pool of empirical studies. This report brings together reviews of treatment outcomes for child and adult victims of sexual violence. For child victims, trauma-focused CBT in combination with supportive and psychodynamic therapies can reduce depression and sexualised behaviour, and enhance self-esteem. Longer treatments are likely to yield larger improvements in symptoms. For adult victims, cognitive-behavioural and EMDR treatments have the largest treatment effects, while supportive therapies are contraindicated. Treatments should be symptom-specific, with functional assessment a likely effective tool to identify difficulties associated with presenting problem

Middle-level Leaders: Measuring their Perceptions of the Role

A previous investigation utilising the interview method revealed key aspects of the middle-level school leadership position. The highly detailed descriptive data on these qualities were re-analysed to identify the components of a construct model to guide development of a measure. This re- examination was necessary because the specification of the construct model was constrained by methodological requirements incumbent in the measurement process. The previous key aspects were not amenable to measurement and an alternative model was developed. This centred on the attitudes and experiences of middle-level leaders which were conceptualised as five facets of the role: role clarity; role authority; role support; role value and role fulfilment

Do markets reveal preferences or shape them?

We contrast the proposition that markets reveal independently-existing preferences with the alternative possibility that they may help to shape them. Using demand-revealing experimental market institutions, we separate the shaping effects of price cues from the effects of market discipline. We find that individual valuations and prevailing prices are systematically affected by both exogenous manipulations of price expectations and endogenous but divergent price feedback. These effects persist to varying degrees, in spite of further market experience. In some circumstances, market experience may actually consolidate them. We discuss possible explanations for these effects of uninformative price cues on revealed preferences