Every Innovation Needs a Bridger

An innovation team can have the right people, process, and funding and still hit a wall when the work moves into another part of the company.

IT has a different priority. Compliance sees a different risk. A commercial partner wants something built differently. The innovation team needs all three to move forward, but none of those groups reports to the innovation leader.

Harvard Business School's Linda Hill and her co-authors Emily Tedards and Jason Wild studied this problem across organizations ranging from financial services to airlines. Their research, published in Harvard Business Review and the book Genius at Scale, found that structural fixes such as governance contracts and IP agreements don't build the trust that cross-boundary innovation needs. The organizations that move innovations from prototype to impact fastest are the ones that identify, develop, and support a specific kind of leader: the bridger.

Bridgers perform three functions that org charts don't provide: they curate the right partners, translate across their different ways of working, and integrate their efforts so the work keeps its momentum. These aren't consecutive steps; bridgers move between them throughout a project. What makes them effective, the authors argue, is a combination of emotional and contextual intelligence. They understand each stakeholder's environment, pressures, and values, and know how to adapt from one context to another. That is what lets them build trust, influence, and commitment with groups that don't report to them.

Most innovation teams assemble partners after the concept exists, pulling in IT, compliance, or operations when a prototype needs to scale. Bridgers reverse the sequence.

They map who will need to collaborate across boundaries before the project creates pressure to do so, and they build trust while the stakes are still low. This matters because resistance surfaces at boundaries: the places where one department's priorities, language, and risk tolerance meet another's. If the first time those differences show up is during a live project, the collaboration stalls before the work has a chance to prove itself.

For example, at the Dubai International Financial Centre, Raja Al Mazrouei, who would become executive vice president of DIFC Fintech Hive, needed three groups that were wary of each other to build a fintech accelerator together: financial institutions, startups, and regulators. Rather than convening all three and hoping alignment would emerge, she started with one-on-one meetings with C-suite executives at more than 20 financial institutions, asking about their strategic priorities and what kept them up at night, while sharing a benchmarking study to create urgency. She recruited startups the same way, listening to what founders needed from an accelerator. And she engaged regulators from day one, listening to concerns about data privacy rather than treating approval as a final checkpoint.

The result: a novel testing license co-created with regulators, and 11 startups in the inaugural cohort, selected by a committee of the financial institutions themselves. Fintech Hive has since become one of the most successful programs of its kind in the Middle East.

Tip: Before your next cross-functional project kicks off, list every stakeholder who will need to adopt, fund, or approve the output. Meet each one individually. Ask two questions: what excites you about where this could go, and what worries you most? The pattern tells you where shared intention lives and where the fault lines will open.

When partners resist, the instinct is to minimize friction: reassure the skeptical department, work around the resistant team, present a unified front. Bridgers do the opposite. They surface the underlying differences, make them explicit, and reframe them as shared problems. That means understanding not just what a partner says, but what they value and what they fear.

For example, Garry Lyons joined Mastercard when it acquired his fintech startup, Orbiscom, and went on to found Mastercard Labs. He knew that the prototypes coming out of Labs would only scale if colleagues in what was then a staid core business were ready to embrace them. So he translated emerging technology for nontechnical colleagues, bringing tangible prototypes to board meetings and investor days to make concepts like cloud, blockchain, and tokenization concrete. When he noticed some colleagues hesitated to ask questions in group settings, he personalized explanations one-on-one.

It paid off. Once the executive team and board spoke the language of digital technology, acquisition decisions became faster, and operational teams became more willing to commercialize what Labs produced. The authors credit revenue from new digital products and services for growing Mastercard's market cap from $6 billion to $390 billion during this period.

Try this: For your next pitch to a nontechnical stakeholder, bring something they can see or use instead of a technical explanation. Then offer one-on-one follow-ups for the people who won't ask questions in the room.

Shared understanding isn't enough; partners also need a way to work together. Bridgers help them define a shared intention, a north star, and then invite them to co-create how they'll collaborate: who does what, who decides what, how handoffs work, and which metrics everyone uses. The hardest conversations are usually about when to green-light or kill an experiment, but agreeing on those criteria early speeds up decisions later. Mastercard Labs, for example, used a shared framework it called "DFV": desirability, feasibility, and viability. It helped Labs and the core business make joint investment decisions faster.

Nicole Jones built and led The Hangar, Delta Air Lines' first global innovation lab. Her team's first project, a biometric boarding pass ready for customer testing in 90 days, required coordination between a startup (Clear Secure), internal Delta IT, TSA, and U.S. Customs. Delta's IT team kept missing deadlines. When Jones investigated, the cause had nothing to do with the project: a costly outage the previous year had made system uptime IT's single priority, and opening their systems to a startup felt like unacceptable risk.

Nicole didn't escalate past the resistance. She kept reminding IT and the other stakeholders of their shared ambition, a better experience for the millions of customers moving through airports, and showed how it connected to IT's own priority: Delta couldn't deliver that experience without the uptime IT was protecting. She repositioned IT as an active partner shaping the project, rather than a service team delivering a technical integration. The Hangar exceeded its goals that year, conducting more than 30 explorations and scaling several solutions into the core business. A year later, Delta became the first major airline to headline the Consumer Electronics Show.

Nicole then built a tool to make this repeatable: an intake form called the "Initiative Canvas." It captured the problem, the deliverables, the executive sponsor, and the names of potential skeptics. The prompts that produced the richest conversations asked partners to describe who they wanted to "wow" with the solution. Partners often found those discussions forced them to reconsider their initial agreements before work began.

Try this: Add two fields to your next project brief: (1) name the three stakeholders most likely to resist, and (2) describe the outcome that would make each of them a champion. If you can't fill in the second field, you haven't done the work of integrating yet.

The first three functions are the bridger's job. This one is for the leader above them.

Bridging is demanding, often invisible work. Because bridgers focus on making their partners the heroes, their contributions go unrecognized. Without deliberate leadership support, the role burns people out.

Start by finding them. Look at who already works well at boundaries: the people who assemble cross-functional teams, build strong networks with peers and senior stakeholders, and are active outside the company. Then develop them through rotations across functions, business units, or geographies. Before running The Hangar, Jones had rotated through digital content strategy, marketing optimization, and retail strategy, and was active in Atlanta's startup community.

Once bridgers are in role, give them air cover. At Mastercard, former CEO Ajay Banga created a protected zone between Labs and the CFO for the first two years, giving Lyons room to deliver innovation rather than defend short-term financials. And give them visibility. At Delta's CES debut, CEO Ed Bastian invited Jones to share the stage, a clear signal that bridgers were valued.

Try this: List the five people in your organization who already hold cross-team work together. Check whether their performance reviews reflect that work. If they don't, fix that first.The role the org chart doesn't show

The role the org chart doesn't show

A project can get through every stage of an innovation process and still stop when another team has to take part. The bridger is the person who keeps that handoff from becoming a dead end.

In the examples above, that meant meeting partners before the project started, translating technology for a board, finding out why IT was resisting, and giving a bridger enough air cover to get traction.

The work is easy to miss because it happens between teams rather than inside a formal process. For innovation leaders, giving someone clear responsibility for that work can make the difference between a project that gets approved and one that actually gets adopted.