These bridgers act as the connective tissue in collaborative innovation networks, moving beyond transactional partnerships to foster trust and mutual commitment among partners—including employees, customers, suppliers, and even competitors.
Bridging Innovation Barriers
Innovation often succeeds or fails based on the quality of the partnerships and collaboration involved. With AI reshaping workflows and product management, it’s becoming increasingly important to partner with the right teams to scale innovation. But innovation can be a complex task, and the partnerships meant to deliver an initiative can often break down.
In the Harvard Business Review article, “Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale,” the authors explore the qualities that make leaders excel at collaborating across boundaries. They note, “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.”
With all these divergent operational capabilities, it takes what the article identifies as “bridgers” that can collaborate across these different divides. Establishing formal structures, such as a project manager or an innovation lab, sometimes is not enough to bridge the gap.
The article authors note that, “Our study of firms that get innovation right finds that a particular type of leadership—what we call “bridging”—drives collaboration effectively across boundaries. [The authors explore the role more fully in their book, Genius at Scale, which will be available from the Harvard Business Review Press in March]. Bridgers have strong emotional and contextual intelligence, which enables them to build trust, influence, and commitment across partners that are essential to move innovation forward.
The authors go further and identify how bridgers perform three critical functions: They curate partners, translate across boundaries, and integrate partners’ disparate efforts. These activities are fluid parts of the process which foster:
- 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.
Overcoming Innovation Roadblocks
In the blog, “Moving Past Innovation Roadblocks,” All Things Innovation examined some common barriers to innovation and strategies to overcome them. With the pace of change accelerating, fostering innovation in corporate enterprises can be a challenging task—a task that is very much dependent on the innovation culture, the team, the leadership, stakeholder engagement, cross collaboration, and other key factors. Some companies may find themselves ineffective at innovation or transformative initiatives. They’ve hit the roadblocks of innovation. Here, we look at a few of the common challenges that prevent innovation, what might be the cause of such problems, and a few solutions that could be leveraged.
Honing Intelligent Innovation Tactics
Harvard Business Review’s article points out that bridgers need both emotional intelligence and contextual intelligence to thrive and develop successful collaboration methods.
Emotional Intelligence: Innovating through partnerships means navigating ambiguity and conflict without being in direct control. But their strength lies in their ability to manage their emotions, stay motivated and optimistic, and take the long view as they build relationships. Above all, their empathy is foundational to understanding the needs, perspectives, and feelings of those they seek to connect with and influence. It informs their conflict management skills and underpins their ability to collaborate across differences.
Contextual Intelligence: Bridgers take the time to discover each innovation partner’s unique context. Instead of making assumptions, they learn through inquiry and observation how that context shapes their partner’s mindset and behaviors. Bridgers seek to understand the forces that underlie the differences among stakeholders, and then they make those differences explicit and work to reconcile them. Perhaps most important, bridgers use their contextual intelligence to anticipate and respond to signals of resistance.
Innovation is an imperative in today’s business environment, but roadblocks and poor communication can derail the best of intentions. But to move innovation forward, bridgers should be seen as a must-have, argue the authors of the HBR article: “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.”
Video: “How to Build Teams of Innovators: Linda Hill,” courtesy of MIT Sloan Management Review.
