Social entrepreneurship has grown into a major global force, yet much of the field still rewards the “hero” founder and the standalone solution. This orientation is poorly matched to the complex, interdependent challenges embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—where social entrepreneurs often aim to make an impact and progress depends less on any single intervention and more on coordinated action by multiple stakeholders across policy, markets, services, and community infrastructure. This research examined how social entrepreneurs understand their role in the broader system, what prevents meaningful collaboration with other systems actors, and what kinds of partnership structures could enable collective progress.

Today, social entrepreneurs do not view themselves as systems actors but as individuals entities solving discrete problems. The research demonstrates that social entrepreneurs could better engage with the broader ecosystem of players if they recognized that their work is part of a broader set of solutions and leverage complementary services to collectively solve complex problems. The worldviews of other systems actors—such as policymakers, corporations, and nonprofits—demonstrate a benefit from exchanging ideas and recognizing that although worldviews differ, there are opportunities to achieve outsized outcomes by collaborating among the different actors. Though highly sensitive, participants demonstrate a strong willingness to coordinate toward systemic change, recognizing their limitations.

Drawing on interviews with intermediaries and systems practitioners and a multi-month systems prototype in the refugee economic recovery space, the research found that the primary barriers to collaboration were structural rather than motivational. Participants consistently described misaligned incentives (especially at operational and middle-management levels), low trust driven by unfamiliar cultures and language, and funding narratives that privileged attribution and competition over shared outcomes. Yet, when provided with a purposeful container, facilitation, and resourcing explicitly designed for coordination, organizations demonstrated strong willingness to collaborate and an increase in their ability to connect point solutions into more coherent pathways for users, in fact tying together the impact value chain.

The research proposes a shift from celebrating the social entrepreneur as a solitary problem-solver to supporting “systems entrepreneurs”—actors who intentionally design relationships, align incentives, and anticipate second-order consequences. For funders and ecosystem actors , the implication is clear: scaling solutions to complex problems requires financing and governance models that fund coordination, reward complementary roles, and treat collaboration itself as a testable—and measurable—innovation.