October 7 @ 14:30 – 16:30
This Research Seminar was organized by the ERA Chair in Social Innovation and the Management & Organizations department.
Gorgi Krlev is Associate Professor of Sustainability at ESCP Business School in Paris. He also holds a Visiting Professorship at Politecnico di Milano and is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford.
In his research, he deals with social entrepreneurship, social innovations and impact, with a particular focus on how cross-sector collaborations and new field emergence promote societal transformations and contribute to addressing environmental and social sustainability challenges.
His open access book Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives received a best book award from the Academy of Management (AOM). His new book Social Economy Science: Transforming the Economy & Making Society More Resilient won the Virginia A. Hodgkinson Prize by ARNOVA.
Title: SCALING, BECOMING OR TRANSFORMING THE MARKET? GLOBAL PUBLIC-PRIVATE INITIATIVES IN IMPACT INVESTING
Abstract: Impact investing means to address social and environmental problems by combining a social orientation and a market orientation. However, individual impact investments face many restrictions. They might not be long-term oriented, prioritize returns over impact, or be wary of investment opportunities with high impact potential if they appear too risky. Globally, new public-private initiatives are building novel financial infrastructures to address these issues. We study five of these initiatives in a comparative case study design under the lens of nascent markets. Empirically, we find three dimensions of market building to classify initiatives: market building strategy, market building goals, and governance of market building. Conceptually, we show how these dimensions can be configured in different ways to produce three implications: scaling the market, becoming the market, and transforming the market. We contribute to better understanding the relational foundations of market building as opposed to technical infrastructures, or a predominant focus on regulating markets formally after their emergence. We also contribute to a recent literature on “early moments” of field formation and enhance it by focussing on the long-term governance challenges of decisions taken in the nascent stages of market building.
The ERA Chair in Social Innovation at NOVA SBE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 951735.