Impact investing has great potential to contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by financing the growth of social sector organisations. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to develop cumulative insights into impact investing in social sector organisations. It identifies four streams of impact investing research: impact investment decision making, impact evaluation in impact investing, behavioural issues in impact investing, and impact investing ecosystem. This paper also identifies nine main research focus areas within these research streams and discusses key insights into each of them. Finally, building on prior research, this article offers a comprehensive future research agenda.
Social enterprises have attracted increased attention from both researchers and practitioners around the world. In the social enterprise context, scaling social impact is considered the main currency or key performance metric. Two overarching social impact scaling strategies are organizational growth strategy and ecosystem growth strategy. However, to date, little cumulative knowledge exists on these two social impact scaling strategies. To address this issue, this article conducts a systematic review of 111 peer-reviewed articles. It identifies and discusses key insights into organizational growth strategy and ecosystem growth strategy as a means to scale social impact in social enterprises. Based on these findings, the current article also develops a framework to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of social impact scaling strategies in social enterprises. Finally, the review identifies gaps in the existing literature and discusses a comprehensive agenda for future research. JEL Classification: L26, L31, O35, M13
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