Announcing Jason Jay as the 2023 Scholar-in-Residence

Prepared Exclusively for FFI Members

March 03, 2023

T

he FFI 2086 Society is pleased to announce the 2023 Scholar-in-Residence for the year. Please join us in welcoming Jason Jay.

Jason Jay is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan. He served on the 2022 FFI Program Committee and gave one of the keynotes at the annual conference in October.

The theme for the year will be Systemic Family Investing, as Jason describes below.

More about Jason

Jason teaches courses on leadership, strategy, and innovation for sustainable business at MIT, engaging students and alumni in hands-on projects with leading companies and organizations. These efforts help build a community of innovators for sustainability that includes MIT students and alumni, faculty, and researchers, with partners in business, government, NGOs, and hybrid organizations.

Jason’s research focuses on how people navigate the tensions inherent in the quest for sustainability, as they simultaneously pursue their own self-interest and the flourishing of human and other life. This work includes deep case studies of cross-sectoral collaboration and hybrid organizations that combine social and business goals. These case studies have been published in the Academy of Management Journal and California Management Review. He also contributes to the MIT Sloan Management Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Greenbiz on the topic of sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI). A key finding of his research is that social innovation occurs through authentic conversations that hold the tension between divergent values and perspectives. With Gabriel Grant, he is the author of Breaking Through Gridlock: The Power of Conversation in a Polarized World.

Jay holds an AB in psychology and a Master’s in education from Harvard University, and a PhD in Organization Studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The Systemic Family Investing Project
by Jason Jay

In order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and create a prosperous future for all, we need systemic change—significant shifts in our energy infrastructure, food systems, and mobility systems, to name a few. Each of these shifts involves massive business opportunities that could create tremendous wealth. But each of the incumbent systems has significant inertia. Most approaches to corporate sustainability, impact investing, and philanthropy have some intention for positive impact, but they limit themselves to investments in single technologies or solutions that often struggle to reach scale.

A new approach is beginning to emerge among pioneering families called systems change investing or systemic investing, which involves deploying capital across asset classes in a portfolio of projects, coordinated with philanthropic funding and political engagement, often in constellations of families together with public finance institutions. This approach usually involves some explicit mapping of the system to identify leverage points to tackle problems like food waste, clean energy transition, mental health provision, and economic development in marginalized communities and emerging markets.

This year I have a masters student whose thesis is a result of studying 24 cases of systemic investing by families, and one case in depth, allowing us to develop a typology of systemic investing and an initial model of capital allocation decisions in systemic investing. As we continue the project, we look to continue advancing the theory and practice of systemic investing, to create opportunities for lasting societal impact by families on the big issues of our time.

Jason’s 2023 Calendar with FFI

The 2086 Society is eager to have the thinking and ideas of the Scholar-in-Residence permeate the entire memberships and have agreed with Jason on the following schedule.

March 3: Join the FFI Board Meeting in NYC
May 3: Conduct a webinar with GEN alumni; details and invitations to follow
August 15: Facilitate a virtual meeting with the GEN faculty
September: Present in person at a Regional Meeting in Boston
October 25: Conduct an in-person pre-conference session with GEN enrollees and Gen faculty, followed by presenting the Opening Keynote at the 2023 conference in NYC
Date to be determined: recording a podcast for the FFI Practitioner

More about the 2086 Society

The 2086 Society was created in 2018 to reinforce FFI’s role as a leader in advancing the field of family enterprise through its core strategies of education, research, and public awareness—and to build on its mission to be the most influential global network of thought leaders in the field of family enterprise.

Founding and/or current members are Patricia Annino, Fredda Herz Brown, John Davis, Nancy Drozdow, Judy Green, Paul Karofsky, and Maya Prabhu.

Previous Edition

We are pleased to provide you with an advance look at the March 2023 issue of Family Business Review (FBR).

As an FFI member, you have access to the complete library of FBR articles at no charge.

Read More

Read More