Social and Environmental Technologies (SET) Catalog
About a year ago we put out a call to the field for commercialization plans for technologies that could address the MDGs. We imagine there are a lot of technologies sitting around that have made it most of the way through R&D but their developers didn’t or couldn’t bring them to market for some reason– maybe there wasn’t a billion dollar market for it, or maybe it wasn’t in the company’s core competency. We attracted a powerful set of plans and decided to put them in a catalog called “SET MDGs”) last spring to see if we could spur connections between these technologies and the resources to get them into the world.
In the Catalog we played around with what information investors might need to inform a decision whether to fund a social venture. If investors are using conventional criteria, they’re trying to assess the financial risk and return of the deal. To get at this initially, they expect executive summaries to speak to the management team’s strength, the market opportunity, and the proposed solution or technology, so we put that into our new Catalog summaries. If they’re from the new capital markets, however, we imagined they’d also need to understand what the environmental and/or social implications of the deal are… and there are few conventions around how that should be summarized- let alone what the due diligence process would entail.
What do investors in this new capital market need to know in addition to the potential financial risk and return? Like a Sudoku puzzle, there are a few easy boxes to fill. One thing might be a check of whether the impact on the environment will be net positive or at worst zero compared to what would have happened anyway. Another has to be something about the kind of benefits a venture may have, and how likely those are to be achieved. It gets trickier when we drill into each of these, although many people are boldly going…
And then there’s the issue of how to present something that connects with that particular investor’s intuition or chemistry… hard to do on a page, but maybe more doable than we have assumed?