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.

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:

1. Clarify ideas and terminology in the field of systemic investing.
2. Launch “butterfly collecting” of successful systemic investing stories (like our the REFED Food Waste case study).
3. 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)
4. Clarify asset allocation decisions that are made in systemic investing and their implications.
5. Use system dynamics analysis to support prototypes of systemic investing.