Impact investing represents a fundamental shift in the role of capital: instead of focusing solely on financial returns, investors intentionally pursue measurable social and environmental outcomes. Distinct from ESG or socially responsible investment, impact investing is grounded in intentionality, additionality, and measurability. Its rapid growth fuels innovation across finance and entrepreneurship, stimulating new financial instruments, business models, and impact measurement methods. The article highlights the symbiotic relationship between impact investing and sustainable entrepreneurship, showing how impact capital enables purpose-driven ventures to scale solutions to societal challenges. It also adopts a critical perspective, addressing risks such as impact washing, mission drift, and power asymmetries. Finally, it outlines future challenges: regulatory developments, standardization of impact metrics, capacity building, and evolving governance frameworks to include vulnerable stakeholders. Impact investing contributes to shaping a more equitable and sustainable financial system.
Innovation activities often have high costs, require highly skilled personnel and a favorable macroeconomic environment. Among these factors, financial development and economic freedom play an important role in creating favorable conditions for mobilizing capital for businesses' innovation activities. To clarify these effects, our research uses the logistic model to determine the non-linear effects of economic freedom and financial development on firm innovation. These effects are complex and non-linear: in early stages, financial development may inhibit innovation due to inefficiencies, but advanced development reverses this trend. Similarly, the benefits of economic freedom diminish at higher levels, suggesting an optimal range of policies and financial infrastructure for maximizing innovation. To stimulate innovation, it is essential to develop and optimize the financial market and economic freedom. Thus, policymakers should foster a robust and fair financial market and implement specific incentive mechanisms tailored to support innovative enterprises.
Impact investing is experiencing rapid growth in Southeast Asia, with Indonesia emerging as its largest market. However, research on Indonesia and the dynamics of impact investor-investee relationships, particularly considering dual social and commercial logics, remains limited. Using multiple case studies and in-depth interviews with nine impact-investing firms and ten social enterprises, this paper explores challenges specific to Indonesia, including lack of standardization, information asymmetry, and limited localized investment. Our findings identify adaptive strategies to overcome these barriers such as adopting a constructive sensemaking process, developing a specific investment focus, conducting due and reverse due diligence, communicating and engaging effectively, and measuring social impact. This study thus advances the understanding of how institutional complexity in emerging markets can catalyze institutional innovation and provides important insights into managing dual logics within the impact investing ecosystem.
Mission-oriented Innovation Systems (MIS) play a crucial role in policies for sustainability transitions, yet their development through bottom-up dynamics is not well understood. We mobilized innovation functions and Resources-Based-View approaches to investigate how a formal network in the agri-food sector developed as an MIS. Within the conceptual framework we built, innovation functions are entry points for understanding how collective action leads to resource sharing and building. This study investigates the FILEG association in southern France, created to promote the sustainable development of the regional legume value chain, involving over 70 actors. Data collected through desk research, a questionnaire, and interviews reveal diverse perceptions among members regarding the association's contributions to innovation functions. This raises questions about the collective's ability to achieve internal and external legitimacy and highlights the need for dialogue between MIS and institutional approaches, which could advance governance and coordination as a key innovation function in MIS.
While literature in social entrepreneurship emphasises the key role of social entrepreneurs' embeddedness in their networking relationships and social value creation, more interest should be directed to knowledge-sharing issues. Based on in-depth interviews with fifteen social entrepreneurs, this research examines the relationship between social entrepreneurs' relational embeddedness and their knowledge-sharing modes. It reveals that social entrepreneurs are embedded in their stakeholders' relationships, so that sharing spaces (physical, virtual, and cognitive) operate concurrently with tacit and explicit knowledge to create innovative tools and new managerial practices. The research underlines the key role of sharing spaces, especially cognitive and virtual, in creating social value.
This study examined how managerial diversity and entrepreneurial orientation affect the financial and social performance of Cameroon's SME micro-finance institutions (MFIs). A quantitative questionnaire was given to 397 managers of Cameroonian MFIs, selected using purposive sampling, between January and February 2023. The results of the structural equations used to test the hypotheses first highlight a direct effect of demographic diversity on financial performance, as well as cultural diversity on social performance, and an indirect effect through entrepreneurial orientation. The results also show that financial and social performance are not influenced by the same dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation. Our findings suggest that MFI managers should more readily take advantage of the diversity of their team and a culture of calculated risk and competitive aggressiveness to reach their financial goals, and that particular attention should be paid to autonomy to achieve their social goals.
The allocation and effectiveness of public subsidies for R&D and innovation are crucial issues for firms and policymakers. This study has two main objectives: first, to identify the determinants of access to public funding for R&D and innovation within firms; second, to quantitatively assess the causal impact of this support on firms' R&D and innovation activities. We used data from the 2019 World Bank survey of 1,096 Moroccan firms (www.enterprisesurveys. org) and applied two econometric approaches. For the first objective, we resorted to logistic regression based on a probit model. The results show that competitive firms, those investing in ICT, and those that employ graduates are more likely to receive public financial support. For the second objective, we used Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to control for selection bias and endogeneity. The results show that government financial support significantly favors the innovation inputs and outputs of Moroccan firms.
