Our impact strategy

CIC was founded to support the development of innovation and entrepreneurship in the Cambridge ecosystem. We invest in entrepreneurial founders building category-leading, global businesses based on intellectual property developed in, or connected with, Cambridge.

By enabling the transition of innovation and entrepreneurship into global businesses, our portfolio companies are expected to deliver a positive impact, both in terms of their product and service offerings and by the businesses themselves. Our focus on life science and technology solutions delivers real benefits for our stakeholders. We seek to understand and capture these benefits and, where possible, explore opportunities to enhance the impact of each business in line with our commercial imperatives. Our businesses are active in a wide range of technologies, bringing benefits to health and prosperity, and helping in the transition to a more sustainable, better connected world. Examples of these can be found in the case studies on pages 20 to 29. Our investment process includes a review of the potential reach and depth of impact of the innovation, including the anticipated number of customers and the likely effect of the innovation on people and, where relevant, on the environment and low-carbon economy. We also estimate the expected impact on employment including, where relevant, the quality and diversity of employment. Given the early stage nature of our investments, these can only be broad estimates based on assumptions relating to the likely success of an innovation, the market opportunity and competing technologies/solutions, but the analysis provides an indication of the potential for positive impact. In some cases, our review identifies no specific impact interventions and concludes that the portfolio company will achieve the greatest impact simply by continuing its existing trajectory. In other cases, our review identifies specific opportunities for enhancing impact, perhaps by focusing on particular markets, targeting an unmet market, improving the diversity of the company’s board and/or employees or managing risks in the supply chain. In most cases, these are areas to be addressed at a specific time in the company’s development or over time as a company scales, employs more people and broadens its markets. We collect data from our portfolio companies on a periodic basis to help monitor progress in relation to the impact analysis referred to above. We use this, and other information, to produce our annual review of how our activities are contributing to the achievement of the SDGs.