COURSE: MBA292N.12

TITLE: Impact Investing and Entrepreneurship

INSTRUCTOR: Professor Adair Morse, Berkeley-Haas

PREREQUISITE(S): None.

CREDITS: 1

REQUIRED READINGS: Required and suggested reading will be included in the course materials.

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: Class participation accounts for thirty percent of the grade. A 2^nd Sunday case memo will account for twenty percent. The final exam accounts for the residual.

ABSTRACT/CONTENT: The course is intended as a fundamentals course for students interested in impact investing, impact entrepreneurship or sustainable investing. Likewise, the course is a landscaping course for those considering careers in an impact area but still trying to place themselves in education, extracurricular efforts, and career alignment.

1st Sunday: (a) Landscape of sustainable & impact investing, (b) Intentionality in Investing, (c) Strategy first investing approach

2nd Sunday: (i) Impact Angels, Incubators & VCs Ecosystem, (ii) Workshop in foundations of raising impact venture finance, (iii) Impact reporting & measurement

Note: Strategy first = preparing our students to know how to use every available tool to solve a particular problem, including policy, advocacy, philanthropy, and using impact measurement as part of the solution set. Haas is striving to be the vanguard of new thinking around "strategy first" investing. We’ll use this concept as well as the deeper frame of intentionality to understand landscapes and measurement.

CAREERFIELD:

This course is intended for anyone who might be interested, now or later in their careers, in:

- Becoming an entrepreneur in an impact sector, whether for-profit or non-profit.

- Working in impact investment (including impact VC, debt, accelerators, real assets) or sustainable investment.

- Managing capital for values-based achievement or structures.

- Working in impact sectors (climate, food, energy, environment, health, education, etc.) that wants exposure to structuring finance and capital raising

- Gaining essentials exposure to the leading thoughts on impact investment or sustainable finance.

BIOGRAPHY

Adair Morse is Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches New Venture Finance, the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund, Impact Investing Practicum, Impact Investing Sourcing and Diligence, and Impact Investing and Entrepreneurship. She is the faculty director of the Sustainable and Impact Finance Initiative. She is on the Expert Panel (for oversight of the Oil Fund) to the Ministry of Finance of Norway, a mentor to Gender Equity Initiative, and faculty co-director of the Haas Impact Research Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Michigan. Adair’s research spans three areas of finance: FinTech/household finance, corruption, and sustainable asset management, with the unifying theme that she tries to choose topics useful for leveling economic playing fields. She has won a number of top finance research prizes, and her various works have been directly implemented into policy via U.S. Congress Acts, U.S. and Canadian state banking regulations, and Greek Parliament tax reform. Adair’s work on asset management includes work on factor investing of delegated asset managers, objectives of sovereign wealth funds, and impact investing. Her recent work studies many aspects of FinTech on the lending and equity investing sides, and she has been invited to give a number of keynote addresses on the future of FinTech for consumers and investors. Adair’s other noteworthy publications in household finance include work on the effect of income inequality on consumption and disclosure in financial services. Adair’s new research includes topics in platform discrimination, impact investing, pension fund governance, and asset management delegation efficiency.