Haas School MBAs Win Sustainable Investment Competition: MBA News

A team of MBA students from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has won a sustainable investment competition, held in London on Friday.

The Haas School of Business entry, Blue Forest, looked at ways of “Monetizing the shared benefits of forest management in the US”. In being named victors, Blue Forest successfully held off the challenge of nine other finalists – with student teams from London Business School, Kellogg School of Management and NUS Business School named alongside the Haas School of Business MBAs in the final four.

The Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge (held annually in collaboration with the Kellogg School and INSEAD) is now in its fifth year and challenges graduate students to devise new approaches and present ideas that have the potential to attract investors looking for both impact and competitive returns.

For two members of the Haas School of Business team, victory allowed them to go one better than last year, when they were awarded second place for myCatch – a lending vehicle aimed at small-scale sustainable fisheries.  

Another team member, Leigh Madeira, spoke of her desire to work in sustainable - or impact - investing on graduation in a feature for the LA Times late last year. In the meantime, Madeira is a managing fellow for the Haas Impact Investing Network – a student-run program that offers MBAs some experiential learning in the format.

Morgan Stanley survey points to growing field

The terrain for those interested in impact investing has certainly expanded in recent years – the volume of sustainable investment in the US alone is said to have doubled between 2012 and 2014. Indeed, in a survey of approximately 1,000 investors carried out by Morgan Stanley at the end of last year, 71% stated their interest in sustainable investment. This proportion was noticeably higher among millennials, however, and almost twice as many female investors as male said that they sought to achieve a balance between the rate of return and impact when making an investment (40% of women vs. 23% of men). 

The tension between the two is at the forefront of investors’ minds it seems, with a slight majority in Morgan Stanley’s survey (54%) saying they felt there would be a trade-off on profitability when making a sustainable investment.

As such, the judging criteria for this year’s competition placed more emphasis on the ‘feasibility’ of a team’s proposal than on the other criteria, including innovation, impact and presentation. In all, the Morgan Stanley competition received 127 entries from 78 schools and universities based in 20 different countries.

The CEO of Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing, Audrey Choi, believes that private investment has a clear role to play in the challenges of meeting Earth’s growing demand for the basic resources of food, energy and water:

“It is easy to say we hope governments or philanthropy will figure out a way to help, but private capital can and must play a role in addressing these very large global challenges,” Choi said in a story detailing the entry for London Business School – which concerned itself with providing electricity to some of the poorest areas of Africa.