Governments are interested in higher levels of collaboration, joint solutions and partnerships, in part to deal with cross‐sector wicked problems. However, success is limited due to the barriers to effective collaboration. This research note reports some of the results of a systematic literature review that identified common barriers to inter‐organizational collaboration across sectors, regrouping them in three key categories of cognitive, power and communication barriers. In the second part, a synergy map is used to link those barriers to less conventional approaches and solutions that can help overcome them and facilitate collaboration, including conceptual frameworks, visual thinking tools and online collaboration platforms.