World Intellectual Property Day 2024 is highlighting the critical importance of intellectual property (IP) in catalyzing the human innovation and creativity needed for achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper integrates innovation research with intellectual property law to explore how such a systemic collaboration for sustainable innovation should be characterised, and how the intellectual property rights (IPR) system could be shaped to support it. The paper highlights that reaching sustainability objectives depends on system-level innovations; system-level innovation for sustainability calls for new forms of collaboration; current IPR regime limits systemic collaborations for sustainable innovations and new IPR system and tools are needed to facilitate systemic collaboration.