Press: Impact Investing Takes Hold on Business School Campuses

CASE i3’s pioneering work in impact investing was featured in Fortune. This is an excerpt. Read the full piece here.

Adding a layer to B-school finance

“Those of us who have been in this world for the past 20 years have had a lot of conversations over those 20 years with only us in the room. And now it’s everyone,” says Cathy Clark, adjunct professor at Duke’s Fuqua School and the director of Fuqua’s CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing. Over the past five years, Clark says, significant interest from venture capitalists, investment banks, and even pension funds have led to an influx of new, diverse voices in the room — creating “a welcome conversation. And that makes a difference to the purview of an MBA and this as a career track.”

Between talent development and research, she says, academia has played and will continue to play a major role in the development of the fledgling field. “What changed about five years ago is that we realized the field was catching up and the term ‘impact investing’ had emerged,” says Clark, who has spent 25 years in the field and who taught her first impact investing-related course at Columbia Business School in 2001.

Four years after Clark came to Duke’s Fuqua School in 2007, she created CASE i3. “I thought it would take five or six years to build a robust program,” Clark says. “And I was completely wrong.” Within three years, she says, “significant numbers” of incoming MBA classes indicated through school surveys that they chose Fuqua because of its leadership in the field. Now between 10% and 30% of each class applies to be part of CASE i3. “We are seeing more mainstream finance students trying this out,” notes Clark, adding that the 18 impact investing-related credits offered by the school serve alongside traditional finance courses. “It’s not cannibalizing finance, it’s a layer we want to teach them on top of finance,” she points out. Every year, she says, about 70 to 80 students take Fuqua’s mainstay impact investing course.

This is an excerpt from the full piece published on Fortune. Read the full piece here.