Research opportunities
Given this diversity of tools, a natural research question is: What explainsthe choice of alternative toolsto measure impact? For instance, financially-constrained entrepreneurs may find it more difficult to adopt project-specific measures that required customized effort to design measurement plans and collect specialized data. On the other hand, certain types ofimpact-oriented investors may require their supported organizations to adopt more robust techniques to assess the causality of the intervention. In this sense, researchers could examine the diversity of entrepreneurs and investors and how their distinct orientation and resources explain the adoption of varied tools to assess impact. If we evolve towards better impact assessment, can it become a new performance dimension in management, complementing financial, market, and productivity-oriented measures? Although the extant literature has tried to examine the potential reconciliation of economic and social dimensions of performance (Barnett & Salomon, 2006; Margolis et al., 2008), there is still room to adopt more refined project-specific measures of impact. In strategic management, competitive advantage is usually measured asthe long-term performance of the firm compared to the industry norm (McGahan, 1999). In the future, as researchers collect more data about project-specific outcomes, it may be possible to overcome the comparability limitations of these specific measurements by assessing how certain firmspecific outcomes compare to the outcomes generated by other firms in similar activities (in the same way as financial analysts compare the returns of certain firms to their peers in the same industry).
