Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale

Innovation increasingly depends on partnerships. As complexity and specialization rise and technologies such as AI reshape workflows and product portfolios, no single team or company has all the capabilities, tools, or authority needed to move ideas from prototype to scale. Organizations must “partner or die,” as one executive told us. But sharing the driver’s seat is difficult. The more that innovation relies on collaboration across groups and firms, the more initiatives are likely to stall—or worse, fail—because the partnerships meant to deliver them break down.

Consider the experience of Sarah, a high potential appointed to lead a highly visible growth initiative at a large consumer goods company. (This is a composite story drawn from our research for illustrative purposes.) Her team of business strategists and cutting-edge digital and AI talent prototyped a promising new product that tested well. After working tirelessly for three months, Sarah’s team proudly handed the product off to their colleagues in IT, marketing, and other departments that would be involved in the implementation phase. But those teams struggled. The product was built on an advanced technology stack that was incompatible with the business’s legacy systems. It was designed to serve an unfamiliar customer segment. What’s more, some company leaders worried that the innovation was too incremental to gain a foothold in a rapidly evolving market. The once-promising initiative looked like it was about to be stopped in its tracks despite the investment Sarah’s team—and the company—had made in it.

We’ve seen this kind of breakdown time and time again. That’s because scaling innovation requires partners to collaborate in the face of diverging priorities, capabilities, and constraints. New product teams are incentivized to experiment; compliance prioritizes adherence to regulatory requirements; IT speaks the language of operational reliability; senior executives require a compelling business case. When collaborating externally, the gaps are even wider. For startups, time is money; they value speed. The corporations that partner with them prioritize reliability; they move at a more measured pace to mitigate risks.

Indeed, when we ask executives what keeps them from offering new products and services, or from implementing new technologies to improve efficiency or revenue growth, they describe how painful it can be to work across organizational boundaries. At best, bringing multiple partners together results in splitting differences or making compromises, which can lead to mediocre results. At worst, persistent misalignment among partners leads to deep-seated conflict, hardened politics, slowed momentum, and the loss of credibility. Opportunities are lost, and investments are wasted.

To address these problems, leaders often over-rely on formal structure. They appoint dedicated project managers and cross-functional teams, or they establish innovation labs to orchestrate collaboration across boundaries. They invest significant time ironing out IP agreements and other governance contracts with outside collaborators. But innovation fundamentally requires all involved—not just the originators of the idea—to experiment and learn (activities that require risk-taking). People don’t take risks with those they don’t trust, and structural efforts fail to create the social connection required to build that trust.

There is another way. Our study of firms that get innovation right finds that a particular type of leadership—what we call “bridging”—drives collaboration effectively across boundaries. (We first offered a brief description of bridgers in “What Makes a Great Leader?” [HBR.org, September 19, 2022], and we explore the role more fully in our book, Genius at Scale [March 2026, Harvard Business Review Press].) Bridgers have strong emotional and contextual intelligence, which enables them to build the trust, influence, and commitment across partners that are essential to move innovation forward.

If Sarah (the composite character we introduced) were to start acting like a bridger, her story could have a happy ending. Here’s how that might play out: Sarah embeds members of her team into the IT and marketing groups. By working directly with their colleagues, they learn about each team’s scope of work, IT’s past challenges with integrating new technologies, and what new capabilities marketing needs to cater to new customers. Sarah also begins to manage up. She identifies key senior leaders to meet with regularly and shares up-to-date data about competitors with them. During those talks she advocates for the resources the IT and marketing teams need, such as training in the use of new UX tools. Her relationship building pays off: Sarah and her team are able to break down product launch tasks in ways that are better aligned with the marketing and IT teams’ operating models. Sarah articulates the project’s goals in language that resonates with her higher-ups: It will meet evolving customer needs while also addressing IT’s and marketing’s concerns. Most important, through these efforts Sarah and her team earn trust and commitment from their colleagues and senior stakeholders. The product’s launch is ultimately a success, and Sarah’s bridging approach becomes the standard for future innovation projects.

Our combined decades of research and practice have shown us what exceptional innovation leaders look like, and we’ve also seen many leaders who have missed the mark. We’ve learned that organizations that place bridgers in key innovation leadership positions are more likely to scale new ideas with speed. That’s because bridgers perform three critical functions: They curate partners, translate across boundaries, and integrate partners’ disparate efforts. But far too few companies have this critical type of leader. In this article we’ll describe each function in detail, identify what skills are needed, and explore how companies can develop and support bridgers.

What Bridgers Do

Curating partners, translating among them, and integrating their efforts are not discrete, consecutive steps. Rather, bridgers move fluidly between the three activities throughout the innovation process.

The relationships that bridgers build through these activities are critical to getting partners to take risks and invest their time and effort beyond their core responsibilities. Specifically, bridgers are skilled at fostering the following:

• Mutual trust. Because innovation across boundaries carries risk and can make people feel vulnerable, bridgers create an environment where people are willing and able to tackle the inevitable conflicts and missteps that arise.
• Mutual influence. In a collaboration, no single party has all the answers. Bridgers build a sense of joint ownership by inviting partners and stakeholders to share in key decisions, continuously balancing the need for participation with the need for expediency.
• Mutual commitment. Commitment to innovation can wane, especially after setbacks or during conflict. Bridgers maintain engagement and motivation by keeping partners focused on their shared intention and by standing alongside them to fight the fires that emerge along the way.

Curating partners.

Bridging begins with selecting and attracting the right partners—the stakeholders who will be needed throughout the innovation process. That includes individuals who will provide access to key capabilities as well as those from whom support or buy-in is needed.

Bridgers foster broad and diverse personal networks they can leverage. When they are in exploration mode, they tend to cast a wide net; when a particular initiative is well-defined, they target their outreach. For example, when testing new product ideas, they’ll use their personal network to identify who, if anyone, in manufacturing has experience with digital twins or IoT devices, elements of the advanced manufacturing processes required to produce the new solution. Sometimes bridgers know they will need to expand their external networks to achieve a goal, but they aren’t yet sure which partners will be required. In those cases they might issue an open call, such as establishing an accelerator program to surface startups or university research labs whose technology could complement their firm’s.

Bridgers vet potential partners as they build relationships with them, inquiring about their goals and needs to discover points of alignment and friction. But making an accurate assessment—and ultimately getting partners to commit to co-creation on a project—is possible only when partners trust them enough to share what truly matters to them, including their appetite for risk.

Bridgers earn that trust by listening deeply. In conversations, they try to see the world through their partners’ eyes and speak their language. For example, if a tech-savvy bridger is seeking the support of a business stakeholder who isn’t as technically fluent, the bridger avoids using technical jargon and explains the business case through vivid stories that speak to the stakeholder’s priorities. Bridgers assume their partners are well-intentioned; they empathize with stakeholders by explicitly acknowledging the costs and risks a collaboration would carry. (See the sidebar “The Key Skills of a Bridger.”)

Engaging partners in this way is a constant exercise. Not only do bridgers recruit new partners as fresh needs emerge, but they also actively maintain their commitment and engagement throughout the process. Bridgers have to make tough judgment calls, deciding when there’s enough trust to take action.

Take, for example, the partnerships curated by Raja Al Mazrouei at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Al Mazrouei, who would become the executive vice president of DIFC Fintech Hive, was tasked with launching an accelerator that would bring fintech startups to the region. Her goal was to secure the future of Dubai as a financial hub by ensuring that established financial institutions were world-class.

Al Mazrouei and her team identified three key groups that would need to work together to achieve this ambition: local financial institutions, which would effectively sponsor the startups and thereby gain access to innovative solutions; startups, which would bring promising new technologies and business models to the region; and the DIFC’s regulatory bodies, which would build the legal framework necessary to test solutions with customers. Al Mazrouei’s team knew that getting those partners to innovate together would be challenging. Implementing innovative solutions always carries a degree of risk, and financial institutions and regulators were understandably risk-averse. Startups had little interest in adapting to the pace of larger, more bureaucratic firms. And the startups and financial institutions were leery of partnering because they saw one another as potential competitors.

To overcome those barriers, Al Mazrouei began by learning what each stakeholder was excited about and what kept each one up at night. In Dubai she and her team set up one-on-one meetings with C-suite executives at more than 20 established financial institutions. Al Mazrouei asked leaders about their strategic priorities and their views of fintech, listening for common threads and challenges. Her team shared a proprietary benchmarking study of fintech globally and in the region to demonstrate the possibilities to executives and to create a sense of urgency around adopting new technologies.

Using insights from these conversations, Al Mazrouei leveraged her network to recruit startups from around the world, listening intently as founders described their ventures and the resources they would need from an accelerator program. And while regulators tend to be an afterthought for many innovators, Al Mazrouei and her team engaged them from the beginning. They shared what they were learning about emerging financial technologies and actively listened to their concerns about data privacy and compliance. Ultimately, they worked together to develop a novel testing license for new ventures.

After months of meticulous curation and active engagement with all parties, 11 startups joined the inaugural accelerator program. (The consort was selected by a committee from the financial institutions; regulators attended the session but did not vote, to avoid conflicts of interest.) Fintech Hive has since grown into one of the most successful programs of its kind in the Middle East. Perhaps the clearest testament to Al Mazrouei’s impact as a bridger came from a CEO who described his amazement during an onboarding session led by her team. At the meeting, sponsors—financial firms that were direct competitors—were “sitting around the same table and openly sharing their strategy about [what it would take to] modernize the banking environment in the country.”

Translating among partners.

Bridgers recognize that partners differ in their priorities, strengths, and tolerance for risk. Differences along these dimensions often create misunderstandings and operational friction, whether in the form of misread cues about why one party continues to press an issue or in substantive divergences in timelines or goals. To avoid conflicts and address those that cannot be prevented, bridgers translate across differences to build common understanding.

They don’t simply seek to ease frustrations; bridgers try to uncover and address the root causes of issues. Instead of minimizing differences, they expose them through dialogue. They ensure that partners’ contexts are understood by all involved, making it less likely that the intentions behind behaviors will be misinterpreted. Bridgers rely on strategic storytelling to make future opportunities tangible for their stakeholders. This approach is invaluable for partnerships between technical experts, who easily grasp technical possibilities, and nontechnical partners, who need those possibilities framed in terms of their business implications.

Bridgers know that persuading someone to embrace a new idea requires appreciating not just what they say but what they value, what they fear, and what they are motivated by. By making underlying motivations and fears explicit, bridgers turn operational issues into opportunities to problem-solve together.

Take Garry Lyons, who joined Mastercard when it acquired his fintech startup, Orbiscom. As Mastercard’s executive vice president of research and development, he founded Mastercard Labs to deliver breakthrough technologies for the firm. As a bridger, he understood that he had to actively prime colleagues to innovate in what was then a staid core business if they were to embrace and scale the prototypes coming out of Labs.

To capture his colleagues’ imagination and create a sense of urgency, Lyons translated the possibilities of emerging technology into language they could understand. He brought tangible prototypes to board meetings and investor days to illustrate emerging technologies such as the cloud, blockchain, and tokenization, which felt like abstract technical concepts to many. Using physical prototypes of smart watches and digital vending machines, Lyons guided Mastercard colleagues and investors through immersive journeys into the future of digital payments.

When Lyons realized that some colleagues hesitated to ask questions in front of others, he spent time with them one-on-one to personalize his explanations to their background and experience. He didn’t talk down to them. The firm’s board chair at the time, Richard Haythornthwaite, told us that Lyons never alienated nontechnical leaders by making them feel like “second-class citizens.” He met people where they were, earning their trust and commitment in the process so they could participate in creating Mastercard’s future.

Lyons’s intensive translating efforts paid off. Because the company’s executive team and board now spoke the language of digital technology, conversations about new firm acquisitions shifted. Instead of needing multiple hourlong presentations, acquisition decisions became robust and efficient exchanges, since everyone was already on the same page. And because leaders were ready to embrace new technologies, operational teams became more willing and able to launch or commercialize the prototypes generated by Labs expeditiously. Accordingly, revenue streams from new digital products and services led Mastercard’s market cap to explode from $6 billion to $390 billion during this timeframe.

Integrating disparate intentions and ways of working.

As bridgers build shared understanding across partners, they also address the practical challenge of getting them to collaborate effectively. They help define a shared intention, or north star, and they coordinate partners’ efforts so that projects can proceed. This work is ongoing throughout the partnership; there is no one-time fix.

Most obviously, collaborators need a common operating model that accounts for each partner’s capabilities and constraints. Rather than dictating what this model will be, however, bridgers invite stakeholders to co-create it. They facilitate negotiations in which partners jointly define their division of labor and decision rights, articulate how handoffs will work, and establish explicit shared technical standards, language, and metrics. Often the most difficult conversations are about choosing criteria to assess key milestones, including when to green-light or kill experiments, features, or even whole projects. But putting joint criteria in place can significantly accelerate decision-making down the road. For example, to guide collaborations with the core business, the Mastercard Labs team introduced a shared risk-assessment framework that measured customer value-add and desirability, technical feasibility, and viability or alignment with the corporate strategy. “DFV,” as the team called it, became a shorthand that helped Labs and its partners make joint investment decisions faster.

Bridgers, though diplomatic, maintain a ruthless focus on what each side needs to move forward. They won’t allow their projects to get trapped in endless analysis and debate. They make nuanced judgment calls about which matters warrant discussion and are willing to speak difficult truths to a partner. Finally, bridgers stay abreast of competitors’ moves that might affect their partners or their relationships. They establish regular feedback loops and conduct premortems and postmortems to know when to adapt their approach.

Although coordinating tasks is critical, building social glue—that is, the shared values and norms that dictate how partners interact and problem-solve together—is equally important, and it often goes unappreciated. Bridgers repeatedly articulate and remind partners of their shared intention, such as “to meet patients’ needs, we will become the most innovative hospital” or “we will revolutionize the way customers make payments.” They also make explicit the link between that shared intention and partners’ priorities. The shared intention often serves as a tiebreaker when debates get heated, and it keeps partners energized throughout the ups and downs of the innovation process.

Nicole M. Jones, who built and led The Hangar, Delta Air Lines’ first global innovation lab, faced integration issues head-on when her group took up the challenge of producing both incremental and breakthrough innovations at Delta. In its first project, her team received a mandate to develop a biometric-based boarding pass ready for customer testing within 90 days. Executing this project required the coordination of a host of internal and external stakeholders, including Clear Secure (the startup that supplied the biometric technology that’s the backbone of Clear+), numerous internal Delta colleagues, and officials from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Tensions arose multiple times during the project. At one point, for example, as Clear produced its technology deliverables on time, Delta’s IT team was missing deadlines. When Jones and her team investigated the cause, they learned that their IT colleagues were reluctant to participate because of a deep-seated aversion to risk. They had survived a costly tech outage the previous year, and maintaining operational metrics such as system uptime was their single priority. Opening their systems to a startup felt too risky.

To keep the project moving forward despite this resistance, Jones and her team frequently reminded the tech team and other stakeholders of their shared ambition: improving the experience of the millions of customers who traveled through airports daily. They also showed each party how this joint goal aligned with their own priorities. For the IT team, maintaining uptime was fundamental to delivering an exceptional end-to-end customer experience. As the stakeholders did the exacting work to mitigate risks to system stability, Jones positioned IT as an active partner that could shape the project rather than as a service organization merely delivering a technical integration. She was quick to point out that Delta could not deliver an exceptional end-to-end customer experience if the IT team could not maintain uptime.

Taking what she learned from that experience, Jones designed an intake form for future innovation projects to capture the fundamentals that partners agree upon and to define a shared north star. The form, which the team called the “Initiative Canvas,” included fields such as a description of the problem the project is meant to solve, an assignment of deliverables, the name of the executive sponsor, and the names of potential skeptics. Articulating these details for each new project often took many rounds of debate. The prompts that led to the richest discussions asked partners to describe their vision of success; one asked the preparer to “describe whom we want to wow with this solution.” Participants often found that their discussions forced them to reconsider some of their initial agreements. But doing that work up front paid off: The Hangar soon exceeded its goals for producing both incremental and breakthrough innovations. In fact, Jones and her team had many more requests from Delta colleagues to partner with them than The Hangar could handle. That year, it conducted more than 30 explorations and scaled several solutions in the core business, and a year later Delta became the first major airline to headline the Consumer Electronics Show.

How to Develop Bridgers

Companies looking to scale innovation quickly need bridgers in roles throughout the organization, from senior executives tasked with overhauling innovation internally to midlevel managers serving on innovative projects as the interface for their function or business unit.

But it can be difficult to persuade people to take on these leadership roles. Innovation leaders we’ve talked to perceive bridging to be demanding, painstaking, and often frustrating work. Because bridgers focus on making their partners the heroes, their contributions can go unrecognized—especially when things go well. That’s why their superiors must deliberately surface their achievements and reward them. Too few companies know how to reward collective activities and results, which can lead to burnout for the leaders holding partnerships together. So how can executives develop potential candidates and support and engage them in these roles?

To identify potential bridgers among your employees, begin by looking to the people who already work successfully at boundaries: those who assemble cross-functional or other cross-group teams, build robust networks with peers and senior stakeholders, and volunteer in diverse activities outside the company. With some reflection, you may realize you already know who they are.

To develop potential bridgers, place individuals in roles that require them to work across functions, business units, or geographies so that they gain experience in contexts with different operating models and power dynamics. Encourage zigzag career paths and role rotations as well as involvement in external communities (such as in industry associations, local entrepreneurship, or communities of practice). Give them stretch assignments that teach them to work across difference. More informally, encourage social opportunities throughout the enterprise. Especially in virtual and hybrid work environments, deliberately create opportunities for them to broaden their perspectives and cultivate their networks. Delta’s Jones, for instance, had rotated through positions in digital content strategy, marketing optimization, and retail strategy before taking charge of The Hangar. That experience gave her a holistic, corporatewide view of Delta and the customer experience and a clearer understanding of how decisions were made across the business. Outside of work, she was an active member of the Atlanta startup community. She brought the insights gleaned from all these experiences, as well as her diverse relationships, with her to The Hangar.

Once bridgers take on leadership positions, give them air cover and step in with support when needed. Bridgers are pulled in all directions by the partners they are trying to engage and influence. Executives can offer some relief. For example, Mastercard’s former CEO Ajay Banga explicitly created a “moat” between Labs and the company’s CFO for the initiative’s first two years to give Lyons and his team an opportunity to gain some traction. Lyons could focus singularly on the delivery of breakthrough innovation rather than short-term financial goals. Additionally, encourage bridgers to conduct postmortems with their colleagues to figure out what practices can be put in place to make curating, translating, and integrating easier for all leaders.

Finally, give bridgers visibility. Not only do they deserve it, but doing so will encourage others to embrace innovation. At Delta’s debut at the Consumer Electronics Show, the airline’s CEO, Ed Bastian, invited Jones to share the stage to describe how The Hangar had helped Delta realize its goal of reinventing the airport experience. This sent a message that innovation—and bridgers like Jones—were valued at the company.

. . .

In today’s world of fast-evolving customer expectations and emerging technologies, innovation is an imperative. Bridgers are no longer a nice-to-have; they are essential to a company’s success. We’ve already seen, for example, that forward-deployed engineers, who bridge IT and business teams during AI deployments, have the hottest job in tech. Across an organization, frontline salespeople orchestrate cross-boundary collaboration to execute commercial partnerships, revenue operations leaders span sales and marketing, and chiefs of staff link executives to operations. Companies that develop these leaders deliberately—finding potential bridgers, giving them boundary-spanning experiences, and providing executive backing—will outpace their competitors in turning bold ideas into market realities.