MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative
The Owning Impact Project
Investing for systems change.
Confronting the critical challenges of the 21st century demands an innovative investment strategy—one where asset owners can spark transformative change, deploy capital with a holistic vision, and make decisions based on evidence and rigorous system modeling.
The Owning Impact Project at the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative is a new research initiative that examines the role and potential of systemic investing – a nascent investment logic that asks what fundamental change is required, and how financial capital might be allocated to enable such change. Systemic investing invites us to reimagine and evolve how impact investment—and finance more broadly—can work.
Learn more about our research below.
Our latest work.
Owning Impact research objectives:
Systemic investing, as we see it, requires mindsets, principles, practices, and infrastructures that are distinct from status quo funding and financing. To support the development of this practice, this project aims to:
- Clarify ideas and terminology in the field of systemic investing.
- Launch “butterfly collecting” of successful systemic investing stories (like our the REFED Food Waste case study).
- Develop and elevate a taxonomy of systemic investing strategies. (Our first attempt: How Can Impact Investors Enable Systems Change? Exploring the Theory and Practice of an Emerging Field by Alban Yau)
- Clarify asset allocation decisions that are made in systemic investing and their implications.
- Use system dynamics analysis to support prototypes of systemic investing.
Ways to engage
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Join our research team.
We're growing our research capabilities and are looking for MIT graduate students, postdocs, and visiting fellows to join our team.
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Share your systemic investing story.
Are you an investor or asset owner that has a systemic investing success story? We're "butterfly collecting" examples, and working to develop case studies and best practice insights for practitioners in the field.
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Enterprising family support.
For families, systemic investing means coordinating the activities of philanthropy, investing, operating company innovation, and advocacy.
We help families along this journey through programming like the Future of Family Enterprise with MIT Sloan Executive Education, Impact Investing for the Next Generation and other programs with CSP, workshops with the Family Business Network, and personalized family strategy-building sessions.
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Invest in our success.
If we wish to shape and shift financial systems, we need to resource multiple actions in concurrent, coherent, and adaptive ways. Interested in supporting and expanding the practice of systemic investing?
In trying to define this new investment logic, we are striving for transformative, rather than incremental, change.Read More
Owning Impact Team
Jason Jay
Behavioral and Policy Sciences
Senior Lecturer, Sustainability
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John A. Davis
Behavioral and Policy Sciences
Senior Lecturer, Family Enterprise
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Alban Yau
Research Assistant, MIT SDM '23
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Dominic Hofstetter
Space Building Lead, TransCap Initiative
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Falko Paetzold
Director, University of Zurich CSP, Initiator and Managing Director
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Oliver Gottfried
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Courtney Collette
Partner, Cambridge Family Enterprise Group
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Sam Bonsey
Chair, Supervisory Board, TransCap Initiative
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Temple Fennell
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Clean Energy Ventures
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