The impact investment relationship builder: A new artifact to improve market coordination in social innovation
针对社会企业与影响力投资者之间因评估逻辑不同导致的协调问题，本文设计并测试了一个关系协调工具，通过影响、问责和收入三个维度引导双方逐步建立信任与共识，将投资分配视为动态关系过程。
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. • Introduces a relational coordination artifact to support alignment between social ventures and impact investors • Reframes impact investing as a process of ongoing relational alignment rather than a one-off readiness assessment • Identifies five design principles explaining how investability is progressively constructed under uncertainty • Demonstrates how impact, accountability, and revenue co-evolve across investment relationships • Offers a transferable design science contribution for coordinating hybrid value creation in entrepreneurial finance