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.