Alice Borrello
Post-doc Researcher
Alice Borrello is a PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano. In 2016, she graduated in Management Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, with a master thesis on Impact Investing, and she has been visiting student at ISEG Lisbon School of Economics and Management. She works in TIRESIA since 2017. Her research looks at Impact Investing. In 2020, she has been visiting PhD student at the Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne University. She is involved in projects on Impact finance and impact measurement. She is performing tutor activities in Social Innovation and Business in Transformation Lab courses.
Research topics: impact investing, sustainable finance, social purpose organizations
Publications:
- Tiresia Impact Outlook 2019
Calderini Mario, Chiodo Veronica and Borrello Alice.
The Tiresia Impact Outlook 2019 offers an updated description of the state of the art of finance for social impact in Italy and some reflections on the possible development trajectories of a market with great transformative power worth 8 billion. The analysis is based on 58 structured interviews with operators on both the supply side and the demand side of capital.
https://www.tiresia.polimi.it/uncategorized/tiresia-impact-outlook-2019-il-report-della-ricerca/
- Preserving the Integrity of Social Impact Investing: Towards a Distinctive Implementation Strategy
Bengo Irene, Borrello Alice and Chiodo Veronica
Social impact investing (SII) is a strategy of asset allocation that aims to generate social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. Compared to other approaches of sustainable finance it holds an enormous potential of generating solutions to societal challenges. However, scholars have claimed that social impact often just employs logic upheld by the mainstream investment approach. Therefore, the paper investigates the assumption that SII has not developed a distinctive implementation strategy able to translate the prioritization of social impact into practice and how to overcome this issue. The thematic analysis of data collected through 105 interviews with Italian SII financiers and the top managers of social ventures allowed us to identify three features of an SII tailored practice: promoting a cultural shift of intermediaries, adopting a coopetition approach, and integrating the social impact in the terms of the financial transaction. Lastly, the paper drafts a research agenda to enhance the proper theorization of SII focusing on the definition of social risk, social return, and governance mechanisms. The key contribution of this article is confirming the lack of an SII-specific practice able to endogenize the intent of prioritizing social impact and providing suggestions to prevent the risk of impact washing.
