Impact-driven market expansion

Introduction

What is it and how does it align with traditional venture building?

Once growth from the initial innovation plateaus, management begins to consider new products and customer segments. This is another opportunity to embed impact thinking into strategic decision making and to make sure that product expansion, whether it’s vertical or horizontal continues to drive impact. A good example of this is Olio, which started as a P2P food waste marketplace, and is now expanding the product into P2P local lending/borrowing.

How does it drive impact?

Growth is an exciting opportunity to enhance impact through three broad buckets:

1. Reaching a more underserved group (e.g. Monzo’s initiatives on helping the unbanked)

2. Targeting a harder problem to solve with new products/features (e.g. Revolut’s move into addressing cash shortfalls through salary finance)

3. Enhancing a product such that it creates more impact

How does it drive commercial value?

As highlighted throughout, there are several commercial benefits to building a venture with an impact lens. Taking the same lens when thinking about growth opportunities is likely to bring more of these benefits online as the company grows.

In practice

What does good look like?

Thinking about new opportunities should follow a similar process to getting started. Companies should look to understand the impact problem, articulate an impact thesis and iterate for impact.

Some examples:

Sadly, we don't have any, if you know of any, please do reach out!