Impact Investing in Social Enterprises: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Social enterprises are hybrids between non-profit organizations and for-profit firms and as such they often struggle in the acquisition of funding. Impact investment aims at achieving a social impact next to a financial return. Hence, impact investment and social enterprises seem to be a perfect match. Research in both fields is growing, however it is anchored in a wide variety of disciplines with only limited cross-referencing. To bridge knowledge in the disciplines, we systematically review 80 academic articles from 2001 to 2019 coming from a wide range of disciplines like general management, non-profit, sustainability/CSR, entrepreneurship, finance/accounting, and politics. We show research trends, link those trends across the diverse disciplines, and identify gaps as well as opportunities for future research. Overall, we find that researchers from different disciplines address similar general obstacles in the market especially in terms of market growth as well as challenges for investors and investees in the pre-investment and investment phase. Only few areas receive adequate empirical attention to draw reasonable conclusions while the field is still largely a-theoretical. Therefore, we emphasize critical shortcomings in research methods and lacking research focus on the investee perspective among other underexposed topics.