About the partnership
Since February 2025, MRC has served as the industrial host of a CIFRE doctoral research project conducted at CRG-i3, the management research center of École Polytechnique. The thesis is conducted by Axelle Guers and supervised by Florence Charue-Duboc (CNRS) and Nicolas Mottis, both Professors at École Polytechnique, and is embedded within Mirova’s Sustainable Development Research department. This three-year project positions MRC at the intersection of rigorous academic inquiry and investment practice — producing knowledge that is simultaneously theoretically grounded and operationally relevant.
Research Focus
The thesis examines the impact indicators currently used in impact investing, across three levels of analysis: measurement at company level, aggregated measurement at fund level, and the measurement of investors’ own impact. It pays particular attention to topics that remain methodologically unsettled and difficult to quantify — social impact, the just transition, and investor additionality — and investigates the organizational, conceptual, and political dimensions of the challenges these topics present.
The research proceeds across four empirical axes:
Social impact aggregation at fund level
Private assets funds face a fundamental challenge when attempting to construct a coherent, fund-level picture of social impact: the underlying indicators are highly heterogeneous and context-specific. Strengthening social ties, improving access to healthcare, and improving employability through training support are all social impacts — but they resist direct comparison. This axis examines what barriers prevent meaningful aggregation, and how investors can consolidate fundamentally dissimilar metrics without stripping them of their significance.
Investor impact attribution methodology.
- This axis addresses a structural difficulty in impact reporting: how can a single investor’s contribution be isolated when impact is generated collectively — by a company, its supply chain, co-investors, public authorities, and civil society actors? The research examines how private assets investors can meaningfully attribute fund-level impact indicators to their own actions, and what dimensions of investor contribution — catalytic capital, early-stage risk-taking, ESG accompaniment — are structurally difficult to capture in conventional attribution frameworks.
Shareholder engagement on the just transition.
- This axis studies how a coalition of investors translates the principles of a just transition into concrete engagement practice with listed companies. It examines how engagement objectives that combine environmental and social demands are defined, prioritized, and operationalized — and raises a distinctive question: unlike established ESG engagement topics, the just transition is an emergent concept without settled recommendations or benchmarks. The axis explores how dialogue functions on a topic that is still being defined, and what this implies for engagement strategy and outcomes.
Comparing social and biodiversity issues as investment criteria.
- The final axis draws a parallel between social impact and other emerging investment themes — biodiversity, sovereignty — that are similarly under construction, with fewer shared standards than climate. It examines the investment selection criteria and monitoring indicators used across these themes, with a view to identifying what structural conditions enable or hinder their integration into investment decision-making.