Here, what do we see as the trends in IMM going forward? I don't know, James?
Do you have any thoughts about that? What do you think? What's gonna be important
two or three or five years from now?
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think we probably touched on some of those that I may
have as well so I don't want to repeat myself but certainly standardization is the thing. The
growing and already vast availability of digital data and tools for gathering is
certainly a trend that probably is going to need some clearer answers at some point
because I'm sure that I mean I don't speak from experience here but I'm sure that most
enterprises are going to reach a point where they're like, there's so much data that they have
available or could have available if they wanted to that they need to decide how much
is enough and how much time that to continue to invest in gathering it and processing it
and you know how much is realistic to actually benefit them and answer the core questions that
their funders won't answer or they want to answer about whether they're making a real change. So
I think along with those, one thing I'm kind of curious about which I haven't really heard that
much talking about in general is I think that the SDGs have kind of provided a framework for a lot
of the impact reporting conversations that have been going on but 2030 is not all that far away
and you know then what? Like what is I wonder if people are starting to think that far ahead like,
is there going to be I mean maybe it's too soon to even know but if since that's become such a
big part of what a lot of people are basing their impact strategies around like I would hate to see
them just kind of find themselves stepping over a cliff there when 2030 comes around. I'm sure
it may be a bit premature but it would be nice to hear some more conversation at some point about
you know a longer-term plan now that we're approaching the end of this current cycle.
A longer-term global framework.
What about you, Andy? What do you see as some trends going forward?
Yeah, well I think as data, data collection is getting easier and getting built into so many
social enterprises models and so I think more data like what James said. More data is already
happening but hopefully, a good trend would be better transparency as people can share that data
and do more with it. Of course, I think that would be an important trend and again just more
open knowledge sharing and I'll say optimistically, more openness to
not being able to kind of let down the guard and open the command we say and just kind of show
what's good and the bad of what's happening or the known and unknown of the impact.
Unmesh?
Yeah, and I may be a little bit biased coming from a tech
background but fundamentally I believe the biggest
evolution is going to be in a data pipeline. What that means is essentially there is going to be a
lot of interesting platforms that will essentially reduce the distance. Biggest challenge or hurdle
once we understand the impact data strategy is how to collect the data more efficiently, faster and
better altogether and ultimately how can the data provide intelligence faster altogether.
So, there's a lot of innovation happening in the space and we hope in five years we're gonna reduce
that barrier that exists today for every social enterprise, where it takes a long time to collect
the data and reporting altogether. Hopefully, that process will shrink, and essentially,
every social entrepreneur will think that IMM is a must for them, for their growth and scale.
Yeah, I know that you mentioned something in earlier conversations and match about
corporate readiness and that being a potential avenue to drive both IMM and also economic
opportunities for social entrepreneurs. Did you want to say something about that?
Absolutely, and so there are a lot of interesting models emerging now. Obviously, if you look at
the picture that we shared on the three stages essentially, many social enterprises are crossing
the chasm of the mid-level essentially. A lot of them are actually finding that once they start
growing they essentially have a fair amount of understanding of who their stakeholders are,
what are the products that need essentially, and ultimately if you look at the bigger picture,
social enterprises and corporates are not a separate thing. In fact, if larger trends are the
larger corporates chasing these social enterprises because they have a lot of innovative models and
giant market that is untapped which is they want to sell that product too essentially.
And so there are places like Yunus business funds, IKEA funds,
Acumen and many of them and many other ones are essentially starting to create a moment to bridge
the gap between the social enterprises and corporate readiness essentially
and that's pretty exciting because essentially what it does is it helps create a marketplace for
the high-quality social enterprises to tap into the good capital directly from the
things. That as you know, the impact capital is still in the early stage essentially,
is growing obviously but the biggest capital is with the corporate all together. So essentially a
lot of you were to achieve the SDG alignment and every business is also ready to align with SDG,
then they will have to bridge this gap so that they can achieve their SDG gap. So,
this is under both interest of the corporate and interest of the social enterprises to achieve the
common goal altogether and I think this is going to be a very exciting trend in the coming year.
Yeah, yeah that's interesting because you know as a social enterprise accelerator,
we often talk about investment readiness
but now we're starting to talk more and more about corporate readiness as being an opportunity for
the entrepreneurs to sell into value chains but also to get access to a different type of capital.