Foreword Global Corporate Venturing Project Partner When the wonderful team at Volans approached us to do a report on the intersection between corporate venturing and impact investing, all of our team at Global Corporate Venturing loved the idea. In many ways venture capital is often about impact investing, in a broad sense. It involves providing the rocket fuel of capital to entrepreneurs who often have bold ideas of how to change society through business and technology. Institutionalizing this, by embracing impact investing, is arguably a small variation from the day job for those investing in venturing.
We are truly excited that this report will be presented at our fourth Global Corporate Venturing Symposium in London. The team of Amanda, Charmian and Sasha have done great research, and we are very hopeful that they will spark and challenge our audience to go above and beyond in their commitments to make an impact. Corporate venture capital has already had some pioneers around impact investing, as the Volans team ably document. After the publication of this report, it is hoped that impact investing will begin to go mainstream in corporate venturing. To help raise interest in this important area has been truly an honor.
Corporate venturing is perhaps even more suited to more closely align with impact investing, as modern corporations often have commitments to be impactful, and so it made perfect sense to us to look further at this activity. Corporate venturing units also seek to measure both financial return and strategic return, so practitioners will likely be more comfortable with the addition of societal and environmental metrics compared to other purely financially focused investors.
James Mawson Founder
Tim Lafferty Managing Director
2 Investing in Breakthrough Forewords
Toby Lewis Editor