Updates
Lean Impact Jour­ney: A dig­i­tal play­book for found­ing a start­up with impact

Good impact mea­sure­ment & man­age­ment are key to mak­ing a real dif­fer­ence – whether you’re build­ing a start­up or mak­ing invest­ments. That’s where the IMM­PACT Guide comes in. It com­bines the IMM­PACT Mod­el with a hands-on roadmap: the Lean Impact Jour­ney play­book, which this update focus­es on.

The Lean Impact Jour­ney is a deep dive into the IMM­PACT Mod­el. Like the tool itself, the play­book walks you through the dif­fer­ent stages of an impact start­up: ideation, launch, growth, and scale-up. Offer­ing quick, focused reads with hands-on guid­ance, back­ground knowl­edge, and tools, the play­book is designed to help founders, investors and ecosys­tem builders make smarter deci­sions.

Turn­ing strat­e­gy into action

The play­book offers a a prac­ti­cal, low-bar­ri­er, step-by-step guide to impact man­age­ment and mea­sure­ment (IMM). At its core is the build-mea­sure-learn cycle – an iter­a­tive process that helps you test ideas quick­ly, gath­er feed­back, and improve them with the help of real data.

The play­book com­bines proven frame­works – like the Five Dimen­sions of Impact, the PHI­NEO Impact Lad­der, and the SDG Impact Stan­dards – with good prac­tices from the field. It’s designed to help founders achieve max­i­mum impact with lim­it­ed resources by learn­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly and adapt­ing their solu­tions to the needs of their users and tar­get groups.

Thanks to to all our experts who con­tributed!

We would like to thank Michael Wun­sch (TU Berlin) for his con­cep­tu­al and edi­to­r­i­al con­tri­bu­tion to the Lean Impact Guide.

The guide was also shaped with input from a group of expe­ri­enced IMM and start­up experts from across Ger­many. Their insights and ded­i­ca­tion were key to mak­ing the IMM­PACT Guide prac­ti­cal, rel­e­vant, and ready to use:

  • Amyn Vogel (LMU)
  • Belin­da Büch­n­er (TU Munich)
  • Car­o­la Vogel (SEA Acad­e­my)
  • Felizia von Schweinitz (Uni­ver­si­ty of Ham­burg)
  • Jel­la Riester­er (Grün­hof)
  • Odin Müh­len­bein (Ashoka)
  • Sébastien Mar­tin (Impact Asso­ciates)
  • Sumaya Islam (Uni­ver­si­ty of Pader­born)
  • Young-Jin Choi (Vidia Equi­ty)