It's no secret how Wall Street looks at a stock; most investment banking analysts play some version of the same numbers game. They gin up models of a company's financial drivers, then plug in data based on what they know or can guess about revenue and spending. The spreadsheet spits out projections of future cash flows and profits, which imply a certain valuation.

The problem, of course, is that there's much more to corporate performance than what we can glean from traditional financial reporting. Any company creates impact across multiple realms. Its products and services can improve customers' health and welfare, or not. Its workplace practices have consequences for the wealth and well-being of employees. Its activities touch the community and the environment, for good and bad.

Over the long term, arguably, these nonfinancial dynamics shape a company's performance as surely as any financing strategy or marketing plan. They can be a source of risk, or of competitive advantage. But as investors, most of us are still conditioned to accept a myopic view of corporate purpose: A company's role is to generate financial returns, period. Even if we didn't buy that, the social impact of businesses has always been insanely difficult to measure. So rather than do all that messy research, we've tended to look the other way.

But what if we agreed that short-term profitability doesn't guarantee long-term investing success? And what if we could measure those nonfinancial returns? Then the game changes in some pretty profound ways.

More and more, investors are actually asking how companies treat their workers, what levels of greenhouse gases they emit, which patents they've filed for, and many other questions that can't easily be answered by quarterly earnings reports. One indicator: In 1995, some 55 socially screened mutual funds had $12 billion in assets, according to the Social Investment Forum. A decade later, such funds numbered more than 200, with $179 billion in assets. It isn't only the Whole Foods crowd taking heed: More than 100 investment managers and investors, representing $5 trillion in assets, have signed on to the Principles for Responsible Investing, introduced by the United Nations last year. "Environment, social, and governance issues are now commanding dramatically more attention," Goldman Sachs chief U.S. investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen told attendees at a sustainable-development conference last year.

That demand has fueled (and funded) the creation of a sort of shadow research industry consumed with both pinpointing nonfinancial metrics and linking those measures to financial performance. It's populated by folks such as Swiss serial entrepreneur Peter Ohnemus, whose upstart firm, Asset4 (backed in part by Goldman Sachs, offers institutional investors more than 250 indicators that cover both economic and so-called extra-financial characteristics of the nearly 1,500 companies it covers. Ohnemus's goal: "We want to be the Bloomberg of extra-financial data."