Impact investment as an entrepreneurial process: Linking measurement to value creation

The emergence of impact investing over the past decade has been accompanied by increased interest in impact measurement to understand both social and financial return. Most literature takes a calculative perspective and focuses on impact measurement as a tool to assess past activities or prediction guidance for future investment decisions. However, we argue that innovations in impact assessment do not merely alter the rating methods or models used to assess entrepreneurial performance, but entail an entirely different set of epistemological assumptions about the calculability and predictability of the future, representing a fundamental paradigm shift.