What emerges from this menu is that financial backbones play three critical meta-roles: • Mobilizing and building bridges between system stakeholders and coordinating capital deployment in ways that generate combinatorial effects; • Building capacity and developing the mindsets for systems work amongst stakeholders; and • Managing change in complex... See more

The overall purpose of financial backbones should be to enable the effective and efficient allocation of a multitude of different kinds of capital from a multitude of sources to a multitude of destinations, guided by a theory of change for a particular systemic issue. The pathways to such enablement include influencing , governing , and controlling... See more

2.2 Why don’t we see capital orchestration happening yet? It has long been recognized that changing systems requires systems orchestration. Such orchestration often needs entities to act as the “glue” or connective tissue— what is commonly known as backbone organizations. Usually, backbone organizations convene, coordinate, translate, and advocate.... See more

The issues that capital orchestration can address directly and within a reasonable timeframe tend to fall into three categories: • Improving the systemic intelligence underpinning capital deployment decisions; • Coordinating different forms of capital as deployed by different types of stakeholders; and • Identifying and mobilizing the types of... See more

Systems orchestration is no new thing; there have always been efforts aimed at enabling collaboration between people. In more recent history, coordination of collective impact work has received a boost after the publication of a number of influential articles in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, particularly “Collective Impact” (Kania & Kramer... See more

New approaches to impact investing E.g., impact-first investing, place-based impact investing, place-based transition funds, and bioregional financing facilities. • Community-based investment approaches E.g., financing community development, community wealth building. • Capital deployment approaches related to systemic investing E.g., “system-level... See more

Emerging innovations The third layer is comprised of innovation inquiries that have emerged more recently, including: • New approaches to philanthropy E.g., collectively owned strategies, Pando Funds. • Portfolio-based systems innovations E.g., Deep Demonstrations, innovation portfolios for sustainable development.

In a nutshell, systemic investing is an investment approach designed to catalyze the transformation of real-economy systems at different levels of scale. It leverages the principles of systems thinking to deploy financial capital in a way that is: • Strategic by being rooted in a transformative vision and an associated theory of change, informed by... See more

Funding systems transformation thus essentially boils down to a three-pronged orchestration challenge: 1. Systemic intelligence generation Figuring out the nature of a societal issue and identifying the financial interventions needed to tackle it. 2. Capital matchmaking Channeling the right kind of capital to the right kind of intervention at the... See more