Driving Innovative Finance for Impact

Innovative finance for impact is about new types of partnerships across sectors, updated ways of working, and reimagining ways of mobilizing additional resources for humanitarian and development outcomes. The imperative for innovative finance today is even more pronounced as traditional development partners reduce funding for the sector.

For humanitarian and development actors, businesses, and investors, new skills for leveraging innovative finance are required. These include problem framing, developing a stronger grasp on diverse financial instruments, cognition about organizational readiness and the ability to work collaboratively.

The Driving Innovative Finance for Impact program empowers you to design and lead innovative financing projects that address complex challenges in this space. You will work on a real-world, high-impact challenge and gain the critical tools, frameworks, and skills to shape and implement innovative finance solutions that drive meaningful change for vulnerable communities.

By the end of the program, you’ll be ready to set up and manage your project with confidence—supported by a dynamic network of peers and practitioners working at the forefront of impact-driven finance.

Identify a project/program of strategic importance to your organization that you could take to the next level.

Understand the challenges of scale, impact measurement and collaboration.

Learn how to identify key internal and external stakeholders and how to mobilize them.

Help build the organizational capacity needed to deliver innovative finance solutions.

Be part of a growing community of practitioners and leaders in the field.

IMD’s Driving Innovative Finance for Impact program is the only results-oriented training program available for leaders with global or local responsibility in the humanitarian or development field. It combines liVe virtual sessions, self-paced learning, mentoring, and face-to-face learning on IMD’s Lausanne campus.

Together with a network of partners including Lombard Odier and the World Economic Forum, you will benefit from cutting-edge content and learning materials. The program offers practical, hands-on learning with a strong focus on case studies and unique insights from guest speakers. Each module provides practical takeaways and you will finish the program with a clear roadmap for your project to be supported by an innovative financing approach.

Vanina Farber is an economist and political scientist specializing in social innovation, corporate social responsibility and sustainable finance with more than 20 years of consultancy, research and teaching experience, working with academic institutions, multinational corporations and international organizations. She is Dean of our Executive MBA and elea Professor for Social Innovation.

Farber’s research is focused on studying and fostering the application of innovative, practical, sustainable, and inclusive market-oriented approaches that aspire to change the world by eliminating the root causes of social ills. Her research focuses on social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, and impact investing, and ESG Integration/sustainable finance. She seeks to understand the social innovation environment through a holistic approach that examines both the supply (entrepreneurs and corporates) and demand side (social but also investors) of social innovation.