The winner of a contest to sharpen the impact lens of students through deal sourcing and diligence was a team from London Business School, which proposed a wind turbine recycling company for investment. The company will get $50,000 towards an early stage venture round pending further diligence by ImpactAssets.
“Before going through the Turner MIINT program, I wasn’t really considering a career in impact investment,” London Business School’s Shavir Pooniwala (MBA ‘25) told ImpactAlpha. “I think now after going through the whole experience, it’s definitely something that I want to pursue.”
Business schools in the US and abroad are sharpening their curriculums and MBA programs to include courses on sustainability, inclusion and impact investing. The next-generation of aspiring agents of impact are responding.
“We’ve come to recognize that the importance of impact investing and ESG are topics that resonate with the next generation of emerging leaders,” said Brian Trelstad of Bridges Impact Foundation, which co-created the Turner MIINT program with the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, now the Wharton ESG Initiative. “It’s only by evaluating a company with the risk of putting capital in that company can you really understand what it’s like to be an impact investor.”
Turner MIINT last weekend convened more than 100 out of roughly 400 students from 44 schools, such as Wharton, Harvard Business School, Kellogg School of Management, London Business School and Saïd Business School at University of Oxford. Students pitched to a lineup of investor judges including De-Carceration Fund’s Chris Bentley, Caroline Shenoy of One Acre Fund, and TIIP’s Monique Aiken. The two runner ups of the deals competition secured $25,000 respectively for their companies.
Turner MIINT is backed with philanthropic funding from Turner Impact Capital’s Bobby Turner and his wife Lauren Turner. The program is led by Adwoa Asare and Jillian Cener, among others (listen, “Training the next generation of impact investors”).
