Seizing the momentum : The rise of impact investing market in Finland
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Recently, there has been a lot of discussion on strengthening the role of the private sector in addressing
the 21st-century challenges. Over the last decade, one topic that has increasingly gained
popularity in business and public policy is impact investing, which challenges the traditional dichotomies
between the world of philanthropy and investing. In other words, impact investors believe
that they can both do well and do good at the same time by seeking measurable social or environmental
impact alongside financial returns.
Despite the growing interest, impact investing as its own academic research field has only recently
started to develop. It is evident that the industry practitioners currently lead the research efforts on
the topic. Therefore, this study sought to address the identified academic gap by conducting a study
in the Finnish market environment. This diversifies the geographical focus of the existing research,
which is currently heavily focused towards the UK and the US market. Since the Finnish market is
still in its early development phase, the aim of this study was to conduct an initial mapping of the
current market ecosystem. The following individual objectives were formed to achieve the stated
aim: 1) to examine the structure of the market ecosystem 2) to examine how the concept of impact
investing is understood, 3) to explore the perceived opportunities of impact investing and 4) to identify
the perceived challenges that impede participation in the market.
This study adopted an exploratory and qualitative research design and conducted 10 unstructured
interviews among investors, intermediaries and impact-driven organizations. Generally speaking,
the main finding is that the Finnish impact investing market is currently strongly organized around
the application of the SIB model. Moreover, SIBs can originally be seen to have had dual objectives
in the Finnish context: 1) to increase outcomes-based procurement in the public sector and 2) to
establish a broader impact investing ecosystem in Finland with a variety of different instruments
and actors. Currently, considerable effort has been directed towards advancing the first of the
abovementioned objectives. However, the broader impact investing ecosystem is still lacking some
fundamental elements that would encourage wider participation in the market. Furthermore, the
findings imply that the strong orientation around the SIB model may have, at least partly, blurred
the boundaries between the concept of SIB and the concept of impact investing.