impactful
insight
Q&A with
Jim Sorenson The goal of the Sorenson Impact Center is to provide students with experiential learning opportunities that introduce them to the field of impact investing and prepare them to incorporate positive social impact into whatever they do next. We caught up with the founder of the center, Jim Sorenson, world-renowned entrepreneur, business leader, and social innovator, to talk about how businesses can support social good and why the field of impact is so appealing to today’s students and young business leaders.
Where did the idea for the Sorenson Impact Center come from? My father was an entrepreneur and medical device pioneer, and my mother was really a social entrepreneur. She cared deeply about children, education, and the arts and she found a way to integrate impact into those three things. I had built a company around video conferencing technology, but we came up against the dot com bubble and it was really hard for young companies like ours to get capital. But I had a brother-in-law working for me at the time who was deaf, and he thought our technology might have an application in the deaf community. We used the existing technology to create a Video Relay Service, basically a real-time, Internet-based remote sign language interpreter. It was a game changer for the deaf community, giving them capabilities they never had before and we could grow and scale it faster because we were a for-profit company. In that experience I learned, in an aha moment, that you could solve problems and improve society in a scalable, sustainable way using a for-profit model. By partnering with the University of Utah I realized we could create an impact investing ecosystem while also educating students about the impact investing space. The experiential learning we provide students through the Sorenson Impact Center has become an approach to investing with wide appeal.
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ECCLES EXPERIENCE