Impact Investing & B Corps
A bilingual field guide to investing that pursues measurable social and environmental impact alongside financial return — the ideas, the companies, the countries and the people. Every fact carries a reference.
Impact investing sits between traditional investing and philanthropy: capital deployed with the explicit intention of generating positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. The B Corp movement asks a related question from the company side — can a business be certified, governed and rebuilt to serve all stakeholders, not only shareholders?
This site collects the essentials of both movements: the core concepts and their history, the B Corp certification system, Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, examples from ten countries and regions, the key figures who defined the field, and Taiwan's own ecosystem. Sources are linked throughout; the full research notes live in the repository.
Why this site exists
At a youth innovation summit in Taipei on 2026-07-19, Ray Chen — co-founder and president of B Current Impact Investment, Taiwan's first VC management firm investing 100% in social-innovation enterprises — gave a talk on impact investing: B Corps, Muhammad Yunus and the "bank for the poor", and the idea that today's social innovation becomes tomorrow's business as usual.
That talk raised more questions than an afternoon could answer. This site is the follow-up homework: a systematic, referenced tour of the field he sketched — from the 2007 Bellagio meeting that coined the term "impact investing", to the villages of Bangladesh, to Taiwan's own funds, certifiers and startups.
What impact investing is, where the term was born, and how the field defines, measures, and finances intentional impact.
ReadB Corps and B LabHow three friends turned the lessons of a sneaker company's sale into a global certification for business as a force for good.
ReadMuhammad Yunus & Grameen BankFrom a US$27 loan in the village of Jobra to a Nobel Peace Prize and, briefly, the helm of a nation — the banker to the poor whose ideas seeded impact investing.
ReadImpact Investing Around the WorldTen regions, ten routes to the same idea — from foundation endowments in New York to mobile money in Nairobi, how different countries built capital markets for social good.
ReadKey Figures in Impact InvestingThe pioneers, definers, and institution builders who turned scattered experiments into a global field — and where each of them stands in 2026.
ReadTaiwan's Impact Investing and Social Enterprise EcosystemFrom Flow, Inc. in 2007 to 63 certified B Corps today: how a consultant turned impact investor, a 43-shareholder investment club, and a decade of government programs wove Taiwan's social innovation landscape.
ReadImpact Investing Glossary26 key terms from the field, each defined in a few sentences with the years, numbers, and cases that anchor them.
ReadSelf-Check QuizTwelve questions across the six themes of this site — half fundamentals, half advanced. Every explanation names its source.
ReadFlashcardsTwenty cards distilling the terms, dates, and cases most worth remembering. Flip each card to check yourself.
Read