A case on CRANE, a tool to help investors and green technology companies estimate the future climate impact of new technologies and products, called emissions reduction potential (ERP). The case includes material on CRANE's methodology for estimating future carbon emissions, including the variables and parameters of the tool's model. CRANE was created by Prime Coalition (Prime), which organized hundreds of investors to establish industry standard terminology, methodologies, and best practices for estimating the climate impact of new investments. In 2022, Keri Browder, director of Project Frame, a nonprofit program convened by Prime, was focused on how to improve CRANE's technical capabilities, integrate with other available tools for pre- and post-investment decision-making, and make the effort as useful as possible for Prime and Project Frame's mission to mitigate climate change.

Julie Owono is a member of the Oversight Board, an outside entity with the authority to make binding decisions on tricky moderation questions for Meta's companies. She considers the Board's impact, and its future.

Year Up, a non-profit that provides training and practical work experience to low-income young people, has for years prioritized impact measurement. By 2022, it had built a robust body of evidence demonstrating that its program yields higher earnings for participants. The case finds Year Up's founder and CEO considering strategies to scale the program in a cost-effective manner and working to broaden the non-profit's focus to system and practice change among employers. But these new efforts risk diluting the core program and, in turn, diminishing the benefits delivered to participants.

In 2020, just after closing a $34 million Series B financing round, Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon consider how to adjust their business, Squire Technologies, to the new realities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their barbershop technology, including tools to run a shop and a mobile app for customers was growing swiftly, but with nearly all barbershops shut down to prevent the spread of the disease and no revenue coming in, should they cut back, or take the opportunity to build up?

With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the "valley of death," unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem. At the beginning, Prime's role as a financial intermediary involved seeking out the most promising market-based technology solutions to climate change and recruiting foundations or philanthropists to fund them. In 2019, Prime changed course, adopting a portfolio approach with its Prime Impact Fund. By the end of the year, Prime had raised $40 million in philanthropic capital for its new fund. Once the funds were invested in promising energy startups, Prime planned to try its hand at recruiting traditional investors to back the same companies. Could Kearney convince traditional investors that these investments were worth the risks?

In January 2018, Manoj Sinha-founder and CEO of Husk Power-was contemplating raising $20 million to scale operations for a second time. From 2007 through 2013, Husk built 80 biomass waste plants that provided electricity to 250,000 villagers and shop owners spread across 350 villages in rural India and Africa. But in 2015, Husk underwent a major pivot. Rather than providing power through biomass gasification alone, Husk shifted to plants that used biomass gasification, solar energy and battery power in tandem, allowing for power generation nearly 24-7. And rather than serving households as their core customer demographic, Sinha shifted Husk's focus to village commercial centers. To bring this vision to reality Sinha ceased operations of nearly all of the existing plant locations and began the conversion to new locations built around the "new" hybrid plant. Thus in 2015, Husk was operating a mere 10 power plants and serving roughly 2000 customers, down from the 80 plants and roughly 250,000 customers they had prior to this shift. After downsizing and reorganizing operations, was Husk Power once again ready to scale? Would impact investors be interested in providing the capital? Traditional, value-neutral investors? And which type of investors should the founders of Husk prefer?

In October 2016 SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese conglomerate giant caused a significant shock to the worldwide market for venture capital and private equity by announcing the Vision Fund, the largest tech investment fund in the world at close to $100 billion. The reputation of legendary SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son depended on the success of the Vision Fund, a considerable challenge given the difficulties associated with organizing a large pool of capital, investing at scale and generating VC-style returns. By effectively anointing category leaders and deterring competitive entry, would the Vision Fund accelerate innovation or undermine the market forces that have typically produced social value by spurring rapid technological change?