Impact Measurement: Building A Shared Object between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs?

Impact Investing (II) aims to produce a positive, measurable social and/or environmental impact while retaining a positive financial return. Impact Venture Capital (IVC) organizations play an important role as intermediaries between investors and impact entrepreneurs. The literature has focused on the articulation of these two issues (financial and environmental/social), which are difficult to reconcile through the prism of institutional logics. The construction of the agreement between IVC and entrepreneur and the way in which impact is integrated into this process is still relatively unknown (Agrawal, Hockerts, 2021). Drawing on the Economy of Worth (Boltanski, Thévenot, 2022), our study of several IVC-entrepreneur dyads identified two key issues: the positive correlation between activity and impact (i) and the possibility of translating this impact into a generic impact metric (ii).