6 of 7: The TransCap Initiative: A Do-Tank for the Sustainable Finance Movement

The TransCap Initiative is an open innovation programme. Its mission is to develop, demonstrate, and scale the systemic investment logic at the heart of the transformation capital approach and to generate a pipeline of investable opportunities.

The TransCap Initiative has an open-ended, multi-stakeholder, and action-oriented structure and leverages methods from human-centred design and systems thinking to build a space for collaborative research, prototyping, field building, and investing.

As such, the TransCap Initiative is fundamentally about real-world action and practice-relevant research. As a do-tank for the sustainable finance movement, it recognises that practical experience is a potent source of knowledge, legitimacy, and differentiation.

Impact Pathway

There are three elements to the means by which the TransCap Initiative seeks to bring change into the world:

Stage 1 – Manage Millions

Finance is a profoundly practical industry, and when it comes to financial innovation, seeing is believing. So to demonstrate the possibilities of systemic investing, enable learning, and build credibility, the TransCap Initiative will raise and deploy substantial investment capital in real-world settings.

Stage 2 – Connect Billions

Systems transformation is a herculean task beyond the power of a single organisation. To achieve meaningful scale, the TransCap Initiative must “build the field” of systemic investing by activating and enabling a community of actors from across the entire investment value chain, and by matching real-world investment opportunities with pioneering investment consortia.

Stage 3 – Inspire Trillions

The scale of the sustainability investment challenge reaches into the trillions of euros per year. Generating outcomes at this level is only possible by harnessing the self-organising properties of complex systems through changing their rules, structures, goals, and paradigms. The TransCap Initiative will produce and disseminate the proof points and stories that enable the mainstreaming of its core ideas, leveraging best practices from storytelling, brand marketing, and narrative economics.

Work Programme

To progress along its impact pathway, the TransCap Initiative must develop the intellectual underpinnings of a systemic investment logic, develop the capabilities and operational models required to put its theories into practice, and demonstrate its possibilities and limitations in real-world settings.

We will produce these outputs through four streams of work:

  • Work Stream 1 – Research: developing the theoretical and intellectual underpinnings of transformation capital as laid out in the design space, as well as the capabilities required to put its theories into practice
  • Work Stream 2 – Prototyping: applying the intellectual foundations of transformation capital in real-world settings to test their core hypotheses and to generate insights and intelligence for their advancement, and to facilitate investment transactions
  • Work Stream 3 – Field Building: mainstreaming systems thinking throughout the financial sector by activating and enabling a community of practice and building a platform for investing in strategic portfolios
  • Work Stream 4 – Enabling: building a backbone structure to allow the TransCap Initiative to achieve its strategic intent and impact promise

These workstreams do not stand as separate pillars. They are designed as an interconnected web of innovation activities that inform and learn from each other. This ensures that the TransCap Initiative can evolve based on both theoretical development and practical experience.

Community & Engagement

The TransCap Initiative is a space that comes to life only through the people who are present in it. The way these people think and act, both at the individual and collective level, are critical determinants of the initiative’s success. Our ambition is to forge an active and inclusive community whose members are glued together by a common intent and excel at leveraging each other’s expertise, experience, and diversity.

What Does Success Look Like?

The ultimate objective of the TransCap Initiative is to induce a shift of paradigms, structures, and practices within the world of finance. We will accomplish this goal by gradually progressing along the initiative’s impact pathway.

For each stage of the impact pathway, we have defined a set of proof points that tell us whether we are on the right track. One set of proof points will help us answer questions related to the theory of change behind transformation capital. Another set of proof points will provide insights as to whether or not we are building the field of systemic investing.

Evolving Forward

At its core, transformation capital is a hypothesis. It exists because of a perceived problem—the inability of capital markets to fuel transformative change. The TransCap Initiative is thus designed as an inquiry, a deliberate and systematic investigation of whether a new investment logic can augment our capacity to cope with humanity’s gravest challenges.

The TransCap approach is developed specifically for issues that emerge within complex adaptive systems. A defining feature of such systems is that they constantly evolve. Likewise, transformation capital is also designed to evolve—through variation, adaptation, selection, and amplification.

In practice, this means that we seek to enable challenge owners and investment professionals around the world to use and adapt the knowledge and capabilities at the core of transformation capital, so that this new investment logic can achieve change at a scale that would never be possible if it were rigidly designed and tightly controlled.

Keep on Reading

  • Call to Action

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    The ideas set forth herein act as the starting point for what lies ahead—a journey of exploration and discovery, a systematic inquiry of what is possible, probable, and preferable. We invite challenge owners, systems thinkers, innovation practitioners, investment professionals, ecosystem shapers, and creative voices to join us in figuring out how to deploy financial capital to solve some of the most pressing and tangible problems of our time.
  • The Grand Challenge of Our Time: Transforming the Place-Based Systems Where We Live, Work, and Play

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    To safeguard human civilisation as we know it, we must fundamentally change the way our societies and economies operate. This means transforming the place-based, socio-technical systems that constitute the bedrock of our current way of life: cities, land use, transportation, energy, industry, infrastructure, and aquatic systems. Financial capital is one of the most powerful levers for driving this change. Yet what remains largely unclear is how, exactly, capital needs to be deployed to build a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive future.

Download the White Paper

The TransCap Initiative is a collective effort. Its contours have been drawn by a community of visionary innovators, finance professionals, scientists, entrepreneurs, systems thinkers, and creative minds who represent some of the most audacious and progressive organisations dedicated to tackling the climate crisis. By participating in co-design sessions and interviews, or by writing about their work and experience, they have contributed invaluable insights to the quest of a new investment logic fit for catalysing the transformation of those systems that matter most for human prosperity. The TransCap white paper synthesises their ideas into a starting point for the journey of exploration and discovery that lies ahead.

Do you want to collaborate with us?

There is an urgent need to rethink the way we deploy financial capital for transformative impact in human and natural systems. The field of systemic investing has garnered significant momentum, and now is the time to scale deep and scale out. So we invite challenge owners, systems thinkers, innovation practitioners, investment professionals, ecosystem shapers, and creative voices to join us in figuring out how to redeploy financial capital in service of a prosperous and sustainable future for all.

How is systemic investing relevant to

Foundations

...because the pots of capital operating under a philanthropic logic are orders of magnitude smaller than those operating under an investment logic, so systemic investing is a way for foundations to leverage their capital in the systems they care about.

Corporations

...because their supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile and societal expectations of business are growing. This requires companies to deploy all the tools in their finance toolbox (incl. direct investments, advanced purchase agreements, and supply-chain financing) and partner more strategically with governments, foundations, and NGOs.

Impact Investors

...because single technologies, start-ups, or social enterprises—no matter how ingenious their solutions and how brilliant their teams—are unlikely to change systems by themselves. So what matters is that these single-point solutions are synergistically nested within a broader systems change effort.

Institutional Investors

...because mainstream ESG investing doesn’t benefit places and communities at the pace, scale, and quality required, so institutional investors must channel more capital into real-economy assets in a strategic and collaborative manner.

MDBs and DFIs

...because sustainable development in a VUCA world requires portfolio approaches to systems innovation, and those need to be funded with a different investment paradigm than those dominant in development finance institutions today. And because the public sector cannot finance sustainability transitions alone, so systemic investing is a way to crowd-in private-sector capital in a smart way.

Engage with us

Which option best describes your interest in systemic investing?

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About

Who We Are

The TransCap Initiative is a think-and-do-tank operating at the nexus of real-economy systems change, sustainability, and finance. We operate as a multi-stakeholder alliance coordinated by a backbone team and comprised of wealth owners, innovation leaders, system thinkers, research institutes, and financial intermediaries. Our community is open to anyone committed to our cause and values.

Why We Exist

We exist to improve the way sustainable finance is purposed, designed, and managed so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society. We believe that the key to accomplishing this vision is to inspire and enable investors to leverage the insights and tools of systems thinking and complex systems science for addressing the most pressing societal challenges of the 21st century.

What We Do

Our mission is to build the field of systemic investing. This means developing, testing, and scaling an investment logic at the intersection of systems thinking and finance. We do that by convening a multi-stakeholder alliance to develop a knowledge and innovation base, test novel concepts and approaches, and build a community of practice.

Our core ideas borrow from the disciplines of systems thinking and complex systems science, challenge-led innovation, human-centred design, new economic frameworks, and financial innovation. Our experiments are contextualised in those place-based systems that matter most for human prosperity—such as cities, landscapes, and coastal zones—as well as in value chains and other real-economy systems. We hope that our work produces knowledge and insights, methods and tools, and a self-organising community of inspired and enabled change makers.

The places and value chains we intend to transform act as centres of gravity for our work. In each of these systems, we will work with challenge owners, communities, innovators, investors, and other stakeholders to design, structure, and finance strategic investment portfolios nested within a broader systems intervention approach.