The impact investment relationship builder: A new artifact to improve market coordination in social innovation

Social ventures hold great promise for addressing complex societal and environmental challenges, with impact investors reportedly willing to back them with over US$1.571 trillion in assets to scale social innovation. Yet, despite this growth, many social ventures struggle to translate ambitious impact commitments into sustained investment relationships, risking the collapse of an already fragile bridge between social innovators and impact-oriented capital. This challenge reflects a deeper coordination problem in impact investing, where ventures and investors operate with different evaluative logics, evidentiary expectations, and temporal horizons. Drawing on a design science approach, this paper develops and tests the impact investment relationship builder, a relational coordination artifact designed to support alignment between social ventures and impact investors over time. The artifact structures interaction across three interdependent domains - impact, accountability, and revenue - and guides actors through staged episodes of relational alignment. Rather than treating investability as a fixed threshold or screening outcome, the artifact frames investment allocation as a generative, relational process through which expectations, evidence, and trust are progressively constructed and reassessed. The study contributes to impact investing, entrepreneurial finance, and design science by advancing a relational understanding of investment allocation under conditions of uncertainty and hybrid value creation.