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22.09.2020
IMPAAKT: HARNESSING COLLECTIVE
INTELLIGENCE TO IMPROVE
ESG RATINGS
Stefan Witschi, René Rozendal, Pietro Valenzano and Pablo Percelsi (IMD EMBA
2019) prepared this case under the supervision of Benoît Leleux, S. Schmidheiny
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, as a basis for class discussion rather than
to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a business situation.
This case won 4th prize in the 2020 John Molson MBA Case Writing Competition.
Copyright © 2020 by IMD – Institute for Management Development, Lausanne, Switzerland (www.imd.org). No
part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the prior written permission of IMD.
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IMPAAKT
GENEVA (SWITZERLAND), JANUARY 2019. Rain had soaked the streets overnight, but
somehow Bertrand Gacon, Sébastien Allard and Sylvain Massot barely noticed as they
increased their pace on their way to a momentous early morning meeting. With their
resources fast running dry, they were finally meeting a group of local angel investors
potentially interested (or so they said…) in injecting much-needed finances into Impaakt
– a company they had been working on for more than three years. Back in 2015, Bertrand
had the idea of building a digital platform to rate the performance of listed companies on
environmental, societal and governance (ESG) aspects, leveraging the concept of
collective intelligence.
Until then, the project had been a hobby for the group, even though they were keen to
turn it into a real, full-time venture. Bertrand, the head of corporate sustainability at
Lombard Odier, a private bank in Geneva, managed to convince Sébastien, an associate
partner at IBM Consulting Services, and Sylvain, the former head of private banking
investment services at Lombard Odier, to join this adventure, respectively as the chief
technology officer (CTO) and chief financial officer (CFO) (refer to Exhibit 1).
The product was a Wikipedia-like platform, where users (the Impaakters)
could write “Impact Notes,” rating companies on their social and
environmental impact through the lenses of the United Nations’
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, refer to Exhibit 2). Impaakt
would then sell these assessments to financial actors (banks and
institutional investors such as pension funds) and return part of the revenues generated
to the platform’s users, to reward the most assiduous Impaakters (refer to Exhibit 3).
The platform went live in July 2018. But six months later, it was still struggling to gain a
critical mass of users and clients. The business model was still wobbly, and the money
they had raised along the way would only sustain them until the spring. More critically,
the team faced a fundamental turning point: Should two of the partners leave their wellpaid corporate jobs to finally give the venture their full, dedicated support? Without that,
it was clear the project would keep languishing.
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IMPAAKT
ESG RATINGS
The ESG acronym emerged in mainstream vocabulary in 2005, but the idea of ethical
business and social responsibility were more ancient. In religious, political and academic
debates, the tension between financial and social capital always featured prominently.
(Refer to Exhibit 4 for a timeline of the evolution of ESG standards over the past 70
years.)
The phenomenon gained more traction and visibility in
the 1950s, not only due to political issues (the rejection
of business links with Apartheid-dominated South Africa,
among others), but also thanks to the emergence of
climate change and global warming as issues.
Among the main champions of a sustainable global
agenda was the former United Nations’ Secretary
General Kofi Annan. The winner of the 2001 Nobel
Peace Prize played a key role in several global initiatives
aimed at better directing investments and protecting the
environment.
Figure 1: Ghana-born Kofi
Annan was the UN’s Secretary
General from 1997 to 2006.
The Impaakt team were all too aware that the world had
reached a critical turning point on the relevance of ESG
factors.
The last quarter of 2015 changed a lot of mindsets with the Paris
agreement, the creation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)
and the Dieselgate scandal. This generated a stronger feeling that
something had to be done to improve the relevance of ESG data. We had
already made the decision to create Impaakt, but in 2015, we knew it was
time for us to act.
The Paris agreement was the latest chapter in the struggle to limit the effects of global
warming, which had already taken a heavy toll on the planet. As for the United Nations’
SDGs, they distilled the efforts of the international community in its quest for sustainable
development. The Dieselgate scandal was the last nail in the coffin that boosted the
demand for more scrutiny of corporations – and investors. The financial crises of 2000
and 2008 opened the debate and the emissions scandal widened it. The financial world
had started reacting – and the Impaakt crew did not want to miss this opportunity.
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The major shortcomings of existing ESG ratings
Vested interests, limited binding commitments and weak enforcements
After decades of debate, ESG standards seemed to gain a prominent status. But
because times were challenging economically, the concepts of ethical markets and
climate responsibility were questioned by governments and heads of state in the name
of national interest. And the implementation of proper corporate sustainability programs
was rather underwhelming. A large proportion of these initiatives hardly went past the
“window dressing” stage (little more than “feel-good narratives”), and very few properly
addressed ESG issues (i.e. they only addressed problems with limited scope and
depth). 1 In other words, the for-profit sector had hardly adopted ESG criteria in its
strategies. Moreover, most of the international agreements on climate change and the
reduction of inequality in wealth distribution lacked binding commitments and
enforcement mechanisms.
Output vs. outcome – practices vs. impact
During his career in private banking, Bertrand witnessed the rise of responsible
investment, but he did not like the way ESGs were being measured.
Methodologies were mostly based on self-assessments, and in his view, all existing ESG
ratings were focusing on the practices of
companies rather than on the overall
impact they had. In his own words:
Impaakt was created out of the
frustration I felt when building
impact investing portfolios. The
data that I was buying from
analysts wasn’t relevant, and the
dominant
ESG
scoring
methodologies had many flaws.
Figure 2: “We’re going to ban plastic straws in
the cafeteria!”
Author: André-Philippe Côté, October 10, 2018
They were almost entirely focused
on the practices of the companies,
which is something nice to assess,
but that doesn’t tell much about real
impact.
1
Leleux, B. and J. Van der Kaaij. “Winning Sustainability Strategies: Finding Purpose, Driving
Innovation and Executing Change.” Cham: Palgrave McMillan, 2019.
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IMPAAKT
Using a practices-led approach while ranking the ESG performance of a company could
lead to very contradictory results.
Take the example of a tobacco company. It can treat its employees and
suppliers very well, but eventually, it is still responsible for killing scores of
people on the planet. Its practices are good, but its global impact is
disastrous. There’s an urgent need for an analytical framework that
investors can use to capture the ultimate impact of companies. This is
exactly what Impaakt does.
Bertrand had felt, in his own experience, the inconsistent results of such practices, and
the effects they had on customers willing to invest responsibly:
Figure 3: From left to right: Bertrand Gacon, Sylvain Massot and
Sébastien Allard
A customer once asked me why Repsol, an oil company, had a much
higher sustainability rating than Nordex, a wind energy company. While
trying to sell these investment portfolios, I could not really support my own
narrative.
The controversy on the efficiency of sustainability indices also revolved around the fact
that they included companies with heavy carbon footprints. As recent journalistic
enquiries demonstrated, indices such as the FTSE4Good, the Dow Jones Sustainability
World Index (DJSI) and Stoxx were loaded with oil and coal giants (such as Total, ENI,
Royal Dutch Shell and Anglo American).
According to the Guardian:
All of the index firms provide detailed methodologies for their indices,
assigning clearly defined ESG scores to companies. However, the scoring
systems used by some indices only count direct and indirect carbon
dioxide emissions, such as those from company vehicles or offices –
ignoring the much larger emissions from burning fossil fuels extracted by
energy companies, known as scope 3 emissions. 2
2
Jolly, J. “Just how ethical is ethical investment?” The Guardian, February 22, 2019.
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IMPAAKT
Methodologies measuring concrete outcomes of ESG practices were few and far
between and very impractical for building well-functioning indices. This limitation was
bearing hard on investors ready to put their money behind truly impactful companies and
projects. Would it ever be possible to develop a workable methodology that measured
what mattered instead of just what could be measured, i.e. unreliable precursors?
Client’s frustrations with current models
Existing ratings measured companies’ practices, whereas the investor
community wanted to invest in and measure true impact. In effect, most
of the solutions on the market simply “branded” the portfolios as socially
responsible, but no one knew for sure.
To make matters worse, most available ESG products were built using “check-the-box”
questionnaires, which the rated companies filled in by themselves, resulting in
questionable data quality. Also, these ESG databases were compiled only on a yearly
basis, not continuously updated as clients would expect. Finally, due to the cost structure
of the conventional players, the ESG data services remained prohibitively expensive.
With all data analysis performed in-house with large teams of experts, subscription fees
to ESG data services typically surpassed US$100,000 per year (for a full-fledged service
and significant coverage of more than 5,000 companies). Only the larger banks could
justify those expenses, leaving many smaller wealth managers to fend for themselves.
The Impaakt team realized that the high-growth ESG market, and the
unfulfilled needs of many potential clients, could be a huge business
opportunity. But they would have to do things differently from other ESG
data providers. Their first angle of attack would be to tackle the impact
vs. practices issue first. If they could find a way to unequivocally measure
the ESG impact of businesses, they would certainly have a unique selling point. The big
question was how to do this.
THE PERFORMANCE OF SUSTAINABLE INVESTMENTS:
MYTH AND REALITY
Bertrand always felt a need to “do good” in his life. In his teenage years, he travelled to
Mexico and got involved in the work of an orphanage. He invested a considerable amount
of time and energy in helping with the structure and the children, witnessing first-hand
how small contributions made a huge impact on people’s lives.
After years in investment banking, Bertrand had not forgotten his passion for global
causes. “The power of the financial sector is huge,” he realized, as long as the money
was properly directed. He followed with interest the debate on sustainable ways of doing
business. But the ESG debate hardly led to tangible results, so Bertrand, Sylvain and
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IMPAAKT
Sébastien felt increasingly frustrated with the many unfulfilled promises of responsible
and sustainable investments.
There were some virtuous exceptions though, i.e. companies that adopted ESG factors
at the heart of their business models (such as DSM and Umicore) and successfully
“future-proofed” themselves. 3
Figure 4: The influence on margin premium of strong performance in some ESG
topics. Source: “Total Societal Impact – A new lens for strategy.” Boston Consulting
Group, 2017. https://media-publications.bcg.com/BCG-Total-Societal-Impact-Oct-2017.pdf
“What can be measured can be managed,” was the Impaakt team’s mantra. By aligning
the potential of the financial sector with a measurable ESG methodology, they felt that
their platform could become a game changer. But could sustainable investing also bring
superior or at least sufficient financial results to businesses and investors?
3
Leleux, B. and J. Van der Kaaij. “Winning Sustainability Strategies: Finding Purpose, Driving
Innovation and Executing Change.” Cham: Palgrave McMillan, 2019.
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The link between ESG ratings and financial performance was the topic of much debate.
While some claimed that ESG outperformance was a myth, 4 an increasing body of
literature seemed to support the view that indices including companies with strong ESG
credentials could outperform the market. 5
The Boston Consulting Group suggested its client companies add ESG dimensions to
their “traditional” way of measuring (financial) success. 6 This allowed firms to boost their
core businesses with sustainable initiatives that improved their financial performance in
the medium to long run, and at times, it opened up new market opportunities. It could
also spur innovation (improving existing products or creating new ones), strengthen
brands and even support price premiums. Eventually, BCG concluded, ESG-focused
companies might be gaining an edge in attracting and retaining talent. Most large-cap
companies had tried to integrate some ESG measures in their business strategies (refer
to Figure 4), but few had committed to a more refined ESG approach.
Some analysts voiced more skepticism towards the outperformance phenomenon,
highlighting that the results could be the consequence of investors trying to eliminate the
long-term financial risks connected to ESG-related issues. History had shown that these
could dramatically affect stock value (e.g. Volkswagen following the emissions scandal).
Pragmatically, investors in general were increasingly expecting high ESG ratings from
their investments, and that was good news for the Impaakt team. The real question was
whether it would be possible to grasp the full impact of investments, and then whether
the proven positive impact generated superior investment performance.
To answer the questions required sorting through data of rather poor quality. Traditional
ESG providers gave a single score to each company that reflected the “E,” the “S” and
the “G.” Hardly any mechanism existed to balance the coefficients of these diverse
factors. Moreover, ESG analysts tended to specialize, making cross-sectorial
comparisons arduous.
To illustrate the inconsistencies generated, oil companies, with high carbon dioxide
emissions, were often still getting high ESG ratings, thanks to their high scores on “S”
and “G,” while sometimes even getting decent scores on “E” because of ambitious plans
to reduce emissions in the future.
Wilson, D. “The myth of ESG outperformance.” Fund Selector Asia, September 22, 2017.
<https://fundselectorasia.com/the-myth-of-esg-outperformance/> (accessed September 10,
2019).
5 Ram, A. “Companies with strong ESG credentials make better investments.” Financial Times,
October 26, 2017.
6 “Total Societal Impact – A new lens for strategy.” Boston Consulting Group, 2017.
<https://media-publications.bcg.com/BCG-Total-Societal-Impact-Oct-2017.pdf>
(accessed
September 10, 2019).
4
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Finally, the large number of methods used to build ESG scores blurred the picture when
comparing the performance of companies, which underscored the danger of relying on
a single method for investment decisions. 7
A company scoring high within one ESG methodology could rank low with another. As
Figure 5 shows, there was virtually no correlation among two important ESG indexes –
the FTSE and MSCI.
Tesla was also an interesting example to describe those divergent results. In September
2018, FTSE rated the electric car manufacturer last for global auto ESG factors, but
Sustainalytics put it in the middle of the pack and MSCI gave it the top spot in their
ranking.
Figure 5: Lack of correlation between FTSE and MSCI ESG ratings.
Source: Allen, 2018. Asian investment Bank CLSA
7 Allen, K. “Lies, damned lies and ESG rating methodologies.” Financial Times, December 6,
2018.
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A NEW APPROACH TO ESG RATINGS
Socially responsible investing was gaining popularity and growing fast. According to the
Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA) 2016 report, 8 the numbers were quite
staggering, with over US$ 41 trillion worth of assets managed in 2016. This represented
a 34% increase over just two years. As Figure 6 shows, the most popular methods were
negative screening (i.e. excluding the bad guys) and ESG integration into indices, but
other methods were growing in popularity.
Figures 6 and 7: Growth of ESG investment by methods, and assets by region between 2014 and
2016. (Data credit: Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, 2016). (Refer to Exhibit 5 for a glossary of
the different investment methods.)
Still according to the GSIA figures, the champion region (in terms of absolute numbers)
remained Europe (refer to Figure 7). However, other regions were catching up rapidly.
While the US and Asia still seemed to lag, the trend picked up remarkable momentum in
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
There was little doubt for Impaakt – the market was there. The team also knew that
clients using the ESG data services of the incumbent data providers were not fully
satisfied. It was time to develop a new approach.
8
“Global Sustainable Investment Report.” Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, 2016.
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Towards a universal benchmarking system
During a UN summit in 2015, the 17 SDGs were proposed as the global way to eradicate
poverty, end inequalities and mitigate climate change. The tangibility of the SDGs, and
their credibility, made them perfect for the Impaakt team to measure real impact.
However, the thematic approach around these SDGs also meant that companies would
need to be assessed for each SDG, as opposed to a single, overall ESG score. In the
traditional ESG business model, more analysis meant higher costs, going against the
team’s ambition to reduce the price of ESG data subscriptions. That sounded like the
perfect conundrum, but finding a solution to it could become Impaakt’s biggest
innovation: Could they develop a digital platform to engage, cheaply and efficiently, the
collective intelligence of the global web community? Not a new concept per se, but the
first time it would be applied to the world of sustainability and responsibility.
Leveraging the collective intelligence
As Bertrand explained during a panel debate:
We are getting outside the expert-based model used by other rating
agencies, which is a very opaque and proprietary system.
They have designed their own methodology, they have their so-called
experts specialized by sector, and they cover hundreds of companies
trying to find – by themselves – what is the positive and negative impact of
those companies. We believe we need a much more open, diverse source
of information and that we need to use collective intelligence and really
harness the power of the many brains that have a say.
The French philosopher Pierre Levy once said, “Nobody knows everything, but
everybody knows something.” In the eyes of the team, gathering this large number of
“somethings” across a large community of analysts (i.e. the crowd) could really become
a game changer in terms of impact analysis. Moreover, other companies had already
shown that collective intelligence could be a reliable source of quality data (refer to
Figure 8). What Wikipedia had done for collective knowledge, Medium for social
journalism and Emolument for salary data, Impaakt was going to do for ESG analysis.
Figure 8: Statistics about the crowdsourcing activities of Wikipedia, Medium and Emolument.
Source: Impaakt, 2018
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In theory, the use of collective intelligence could fill the gaps left by traditional ESG
providers. First, using this approach for ESG analysis would result in a much larger and
diversified pool of (independent) resources. For traditional players, ESG analyses were
typically done by a single expert and based on the companies’ corporate social
responsibility (CSR) reports and annual questionnaires filled out by the companies
themselves. The Impaakt model invited its analyst community to rely on multiple sources,
such as reports from research institutes, consulting firms, think tanks, etc. This would
create more balanced ESG impact analyses.
The new design of the platform allowed the submission of ESG analyses on a continuous
basis, so that the large community of analysts could respond to any new kind of
information released to the public. As a result, Impaakt could generate real-time, floating
impact ratings on any company.
Finally, by relying on crowdsourced data, the new Impaakt business model broke with
the inherently high fixed-cost structure of the traditional business model. The latter could
significantly reduce the subscription cost and make the ESG data available to the
underserved segment of smaller and medium-sized asset managers.
THE START-UP CHALLENGES
Figure 9: Impaakt’s methodology.
Source: Company data, 2018
At the beginning in 2015, Bertrand
was the driving force of the
company. With his drive and
motivation,
he
convinced
Sébastien and Sylvain to join forces
to bring the platform to life.
However, they were not ready to
leave their current jobs; with
families and kids, they did not feel
safe taking the leap. They elected
to dedicate 20 hours per week – on
top of their professions – to their
new project.
After 18 months of intense and
iterative IT developments led by
Sébastien, the Impaakt team finally opened the platform to the public. Tremendous
efforts were made to deliver a robust yet simple and user-friendly application. The crowd
of analysts, affectionately referred to as the Impaakters, were asked to write impact
notes. These were short analyses on the impact of a company on a specific SDG. The
format was left relatively free, if it adhered to certain guidelines (refer to Figure 9 and
Exhibits 6 and 7), such as it was firmly supported by publicly available information.
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We are not imposing any framework beyond the 17 SDGs themselves,
which is not so much of a constraint, but rather a thematic categorization
of impact. Beyond that, it is free form, so everybody is able to propose an
angle of analysis. We expect Impaakters to summarize existing
information, but we don’t expect much work from them.
Impaakters also rated the Impact Notes written by others, evaluating the quality of the
analysis and, ultimately, the actual impact of the companies under review. Finally, the
platform’s algorithms consolidated all the crowdsourced ratings to establish a listed
impact score on a chosen SDG. In the design of the platform, collective intelligence would
guarantee the quality of the analyses. Sébastien’s experience in specifying,
implementing and testing complex systems was critical to building a solution that could
compute metrics the community and clients could rely upon.
We empower the community with the role of cleaning up the data,
identifying who is doing the right job and who is not. Also, we use an
algorithm that gives more weight to the knowledgeable users over the less
knowledgeable ones. It also detects anomalies in voting. For example, we
can spot if users keep rating a single company or one thematic extremely
well (or poorly).
The monetization and growth debates
The founders also had long discussions on the ultimate business form. Should they
establish themselves as a for-profit company or not. They decided on a for-profit status
for two reasons: They did not want to ask for donations, like Wikipedia, and they wanted
to prove that companies that “do good” could also earn money. The biggest challenge
then became growing the platform fast enough to gain traction, i.e. to become an
appealing alternative to traditional ESG data providers and attract paying customers.
Traditional ESG data providers covered thousands of companies in their databases
(refer to Figure 10); the Impaakt team needed to at least match this. This was an
enormous challenge. “We have a huge chicken-and-egg problem,” noted Sylvain: The
longer it took to grow a critical mass of active Impaakters, the more it would eat into their
already critical resources. Therefore, to quickly attract users, the team decided to return
a “substantial” percentage of the revenues generated on the platform to the active
contributors.
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Figure 10: Overview of currently active ESG data providers.
Source: Impaakt 2018, Journal of Environmental Investing
Furthermore, to combat the issue of attracting people that were only in it for the money
(instead of the facts), the Impaakt team decided to specifically reward only the users
producing high-quality analyses (determined by the platform’s internal rating system).
In December 2018, the first Impaakters started getting rewarded CHF 100 for each of
their contributions to the platform (refer to Exhibit 8). Unfortunately, even with the reward
system in place, the growth of the platform remained slow. In the first six months, only
120 Impact Notes were written (each one rated on average 11 times), covering around
90 companies and written by only 48 users. A disappointing result, considering that –
according to their forecasts – Impaakt expected at least 13,000 notes covering more than
1,400 companies by the end of 2019. How could they get there?
Mobilizing Impaakters
Figure 11: Projections of the quarterly and cumulative numbers of Impact Notes, and the
cumulative numbers of companies covered on the Impaakt platform.
Source: Company data, 2018
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To mobilize additional Impaakters, the company partnered in December 2018 with the
Graduate Institute of Geneva, the oldest post-graduate school of international relations
in continental Europe. A 2.5-hour “Impaaktathon” was organized, where the founders
engaged students and academic personnel to promote the platform and its functioning –
to boost not only the number of Impact Notes, but also to spark a positive network effect
among the academic community.
The Impaaktathon delivered in terms of awareness, but not so much on notes. They still
needed quantity – and quality – on their platform, and they needed it quickly.
More challenges looming
The founders also needed more money to stay on course and be able to devote more of
their time to Impaakt. The real issue though was how to build and maintain an active
community of users, ensuring that Impaakters would contribute regularly to the growth of
the platform.
The team was very open, in their internal discussions, in recognizing some of the
shortcomings that Impaakt had thus far. Their number one problem was building the
community. None of them knew anything about community management – a skill they
did not need in their respective careers. Although finances were tight, they had discussed
at length whether they should hire somebody with this specific profile – to “moderate” the
platform and to organize events
such as Impaaktathons. The
team also knew that outside of
their “core networks” of (Swiss)
academia and sustainable
investment
enthusiasts,
Impaakt hardly existed. Was it
time to drive a significant social
media marketing push to boost
the platform? They would
probably need to invest more in
professional support in this
sense. But could they afford It,
with money and time running
Figure 12: The Impaakt team at an Impaaktathon event.
thin?
Another source of (heated) internal discussion was incentives. A prize of CHF 100 for a
high-quality contribution was appealing for students looking for pocket money, but was
this enough to attract professional, robust impact analyses? Probably not. What could
be the solution then? Increasing the reward? Pay the best platform users to become
“platform ambassadors” (a sort of “sustainable investing influencer” in the world of social
media for instance)?
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What about the growth prospects? The platform initially focused on public companies,
as most of their competitors did. For private companies, investors and analysts typically
relied on tailor-made impact tools, prepared by a few specialized firms. Impaakt’s
methodology was suitable for private companies, but these were not yet included in the
system. Was this a logical, future expansion of the platform?
The team was also aware that they would have to speed up the technical development
of the platform, e.g. by building an app for mobile devices, or by making Impaakt more
attractive through some form of gamification. Could they use Sébastien’s IT skills to build
on the potential of artificial intelligence? It was becoming clearer and clearer that they
needed external help to not only challenge them but also improve what they were doing.
Getting outside investors, in particular value-adding and committed business angels,
could do the trick. But so would joining the Swiss incubator program – Fongit – which
they did in May 2019.
In the words of Sylvain, “Start-ups must evolve to succeed, and Impaakt is no exception.”
Perhaps more drastic changes were now needed, more akin to a real pivot. Should they
consider buying content, instead of relying on the goodwill of the collective intelligence?
Should they start leveraging data science to generate new notes more automatically?
Customizing data and reports upon customers’ specific requests? With all these open
burning questions, they knew that time was running out.
BACK TO EARTH: INVESTOR MEETING LOOMING
Bertrand mentally went through the slide deck one more time. He knew that if they could
not convince them to invest in the Impaakt project, their adventure would not survive to
see the summer. He looked at Sébastien and Sylvain. They had been fantastic in their
help and support so far. Together, they worked tirelessly on the company’s design and
concept, managed to bring the platform online in record time and started to see the
validation of their plan for a new, more impactful ESG platform.
But without some immediate changes in their numbers, the money would stop flowing,
and they would have to give up on their plans. They firmly believed in what they were
doing, and they very much hoped that their own efforts could have a real impact on the
investing world.
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IMPAAKT
Exhibit 1: The Impaakt founders
Source: Impaakt
Exhibit 2: The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals
Source: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs
Exhibit 3: Impaakt’s business model
Source: Impaakt
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This document is authorized for use only by Taylor Jackson in ITOM 6205-Digital Strategy taught by Ulrike Schultze, Southern Methodist University from Jan 2022 to Mar 2022.
For the exclusive use of T. Jackson, 2022.
IMD-7-2120
IMPAAKT
Exhibit 4: ESG evolution: A timeline
Source: Case authors, from public sources
© 2020 by IMD
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This document is authorized for use only by Taylor Jackson in ITOM 6205-Digital Strategy taught by Ulrike Schultze, Southern Methodist University from Jan 2022 to Mar 2022.
For the exclusive use of T. Jackson, 2022.
IMD-7-2120
IMPAAKT
Exhibit 5: Glossary of investment terms
Source: http://www.gsi-alliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/GSIR_Review2016.F.pdf
© 2020 by IMD
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This document is authorized for use only by Taylor Jackson in ITOM 6205-Digital Strategy taught by Ulrike Schultze, Southern Methodist University from Jan 2022 to Mar 2022.
For the exclusive use of T. Jackson, 2022.
IMD-7-2120
IMPAAKT
Exhibit 6: Editorial charter on impact notes
Source: Impaakt
© 2020 by IMD
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This document is authorized for use only by Taylor Jackson in ITOM 6205-Digital Strategy taught by Ulrike Schultze, Southern Methodist University from Jan 2022 to Mar 2022.
For the exclusive use of T. Jackson, 2022.
IMD-7-2120
IMPAAKT
Exhibit 7: Sample impact note
Source: Impaakt
© 2020 by IMD
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This document is authorized for use only by Taylor Jackson in ITOM 6205-Digital Strategy taught by Ulrike Schultze, Southern Methodist University from Jan 2022 to Mar 2022.
For the exclusive use of T. Jackson, 2022.
IMD-7-2120
IMPAAKT
Exhibit 8: Announcement of reward to Impaakters and Impaaktathon invitation
Source: Impaakt
© 2020 by IMD
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For the exclusive use of T. Jackson, 2022.
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IMPAAKT
References
Books and articles:
Eccles, Rpbert G., Mary Johnstone-Louis, Colin Mayer and Judith C. Stroehle, “The
Board’s Role in Sustanability”, Harvard Business Review, September-October 2020,
p.48-51
Leleux, B. and J. van der Kaaij. Winning Sustainability Strategies. Finding Purpose,
Driving Innovation and Executing Change. Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
MacMahon, Simon, “The Challenge of Rating ESG Performance”, Harvard Business
Review, September-October 2020, p.52-54
Serafeim, George, “Social-Impact Efforts that Create Real Value”, Harvard Business
Review, September-October 2020, p.38-48
Websites:
United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. https://www.unpri.org/
Partnerships for the SDGs. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/partnerships/
Sustainable Development Investment Partnership. http://sdiponline.org/
Impaakt, company website. http://www.impaakt.com/
© 2020 by IMD
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