Innofins

Goals

Innofins has two main objectives:

1. Develop, test and evaluate alternative financing instruments for NBO in Flanders for concrete projects in four Urban Living Labs.
2. The analysis of the interplay and impact of alternative business models on urban governance, planning and design, valuation methods, legal aspects and socio-economic development.

Focus on three categories of financial instruments

Land value capture

Land Value Capture tools are intended to monetize and use the gains in land value resulting from public decisions. This tool has already been used to finance transport infrastructure but could also be applied to the added value generated by green infrastructure In Flanders, there are currently no instruments available to exploit the benefits of public investment leading to an increase in land value, although some cities try to exploit them through public levies and developer levies.

Crowdfunding through ICOs

The practice of financing green infrastructure via crowdfunding is also emerging in Flanders and a number of crowdfunding platforms for local initiatives have been developed (eg Ghent and Mechelen). The next step in crowdfunding could be the use of initial coin offerings (ICOs). Via these 'tokens', the financier can acquire a share or obtain the right to use a nature-based solution. While the applications are promising, ICOs are currently largely unregulated.

Impact financing

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are an emerging practice in the field of social innovation. They can be considered a private investment in social programs with a market return if predefined result targets are achieved. SIBs are related to Public Private Partnerships (PPP), but interestingly, SIB aims to monetize savings (often through prevention) rather than future cash flows (as is the case with PPP). State-of-the-art research into SIBs and PPPs is still unclear about the transferability of social to NBO projects.