IMD Case Study on Impaakt wins International MBA Case Writing Competition

The John Molson International MBA Case Writing Competition is recongisned around the globe.
It is a not-for-profit event organized by a team of MBA candidates from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal, with the mission  to bridge the gap between the corporate world and academia, it is recognized as the largest case competition of its kind.

Professor Benoit Leleux of the IMD (The Institute for Management Development) case study “Impaakt: Crowdsourcing Better ESG Ratings” focuses on the development of the Impaakt platform. Following our founders as they faced many challenges, including the complexity of building and managing a crowd-sourced solution to ratings.

"Capitalizing on collective intelligence is not as easy as it sounds. The case highlights the key difficulties in creating a potent platform and leveraging the crowd," says Professor Leleux.

Learn more about the competition and the other winners here.

Professor Leleux took home first place aswell as his Impaakt Case study taking fourth place.

We've shared a summary of the case study below which can be ordered here.

Impaakt: Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Improve ESG Ratings

Written by Professor Benoit F. Leleux, Pablo Percelsi, René Rozendal, Pietro Valenzano Menada and Stefan Witschi.

"The global rise of responsible investing in the last decades (boosted by the increasing debates around climate change, business ethics and distribution of wealth) urged the development of coherent and reliable methodologies gauging the effect of business on Environmental, Societal and Governance (ESG) aspects.

However, existing ESG rating methods not only differs greatly among themselves, but they are also typically based on companies' own practices (outputs), not on the final impact (outcome). To measure the latter, a Geneva-based company called Impaakt developed a digital platform, using the 17 United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as benchmark, engaging the collective intelligence of the global community (on a Wikipedia-like model) to achieve this ambitious goal.

This case explores the strategies behind the design of such a platform, investigates the importance of scale and sides, and analyses to what extent social and environmental impact can be measured objectively."

Updated January 10th 2021:

Professor Leleux's case on Impaakt was named runner up in the 2021 HEC Montréal CSR Challenge / Défi RSE.