How to incentivize those who already have everything, to contribute dramatically more to impact investing and philanthropy? By creating a new concept in dollars, the language that billionaires understand best, to measure their contributions to all forms of good (“Impact Currency”), as part of the marquee Forbes billionaires ranking. "Money itself is generally viewed as a measure of success. But doesn't the world need a completely different currency? Not just a number of zeros reflecting wealth, but rather money that measures the ability to give, not take?" This is what I proposed in my article "Impact Currency: Why Forbes Needs New Impact Investments Ratings,” , which launched the project. https://www.forbes.ru/biznes/414703-impact-currency-why-forbes-needs-new-impact-investments-ratings
The pilot Impact Currency ranking is now published in the September 2021 issue of Forbes Russia. It turns out that Russia has its own Elon Musk! Denis Sverdlov is the founder of Arrival, a British electric vehicle company focused on buses and commercial vehicles, which completed an IPO earlier this year. Now he is on the cover of the magazine with $5.65 billion in Impact Currency.
Thank you, my dear friends from Stanford Executive Program and Reaction who participated in our “Impact Currency working group”: Rui Barros, Algernon Callier, Edward Chuang, Miguel Esbri, Mario Ferro, Brian Fleming, Nuno Gonçalves, Hassan Kadbi, Bilge Kagan Ozturk, Carlos Peredo, Valery Vavilov and Jose Zurstrassen! It was an intellectual pleasure to brainstorm together over the past nine months on creating the unprecedented methodology for adding up all forms of “good” into one Impact Currency number. Thank you, Dan Matthies and others from Reaction who helped! A Forbes quote from all the 14 of us is in the attached image.
Thank you also to Stanford Center for Social Innovation, Professors Jeff Pfeffer, Baba Shiv and Matt Abrahams, as well as Director of the Global Innovation for Impact Lab at the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Christian Seelos and all the others who contributed!
Directors of Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University Graduate School of Business Bernadette Clavier and Neil Malhotra, in their interview with Forbes Russia, summarize our project as follows: “The Impact Currency now has the potential to create new incentives for the rich to channel as much money as possible into public good.” https://www.forbes.ru/biznes/431057-more-transparency-about-impact-investments-will-be-positive-development-experts-about
