Preface
Ten Years in the Making: Building Japan’s Impact Economy (Ten Years in the Making) , a case and film series, is designed to be used by academics and practitioners globally. It will be taught at the Oxford Impact Investing Programme and featured in an upcoming book to be published by Palgrave Macmillan— Good, Evil, Wicked: The Art, Science, and Business of Sustainable Finance. Ten Years in the Making is a snapshot of a moment in time ending in 2024. It is important to acknowledge that 2025 has brought dramatic changes to the Japanese economy through geopolitics. The implications of these changes and their impacts are still unclear. Japan is no longer the fourth-largest economy. It has been surpassed by India. In addition, SIIF has expanded its program efforts globally and it is in the early stages of forming its strategy. In October 2025, Japan also saw the election of its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. These changes are not reflected in this document. Rather, the series provides relevant teaching content for launching an impact economy and the challenges and opportunities for early-stage efforts to build multi-sector partnerships, create new impact funds, integrate community in the investment and systems change process, and provide collaborative leadership models. It is part of a compendium of cases that have been developed over the past decade to examine the strategies global leaders need—and use—to tackle the world’s most wickedly complex problems. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report, the dominant threats that keep leaders awake include climate-related disasters, environmental and biodiversity collapse, digital polarization and misinformation, rising economic tensions and inequality, global power shifts, aging populations, and biotech challenges. For almost a decade, the United Nations Development Programme’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have offered solutions to these challenges. With an estimated funding shortfall of US$2.5 trillion, the private sector has been called upon to help fill the gap through new cross-sector partnerships 4
Ten Years in the Making
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