By asahifile 
What the article is
The cover package of Harvard Business Review, March–April 2026: “Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale” (pp.74–86), by Linda A. Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild of Paradox Strategies. It condenses their book Genius at Scale, published by Harvard Business Review Press in March 2026.
What it argues
The thesis is blunt. Innovation does not fail at the idea stage; it fails at the boundary. A prototype that tests well stalls when IT, marketing, compliance and outside partners pull in different directions. The authors’ fieldwork points to a cause that is not a missing structure but a missing leadership capability, which they call bridging.
Bridgers do three things: they curate partners, they translate across contexts, and they integrate efforts that would otherwise stay separate. The foundation is emotional and contextual intelligence, and the payoff is mutual trust, mutual influence and mutual commitment. Structure alone — a PMO, an innovation lab, a thick IP agreement — cannot create the relationships in which people are willing to take risks with each other.
The cases include Raja Al Mazrouei building a fintech accelerator at the Dubai International Financial Centre, and a corporate lab that negotiated a two-year buffer with its own CFO so a breakthrough team could work without quarterly earnings pressure. In each, the bridger makes the partner the hero and stays out of the frame.
What makes the argument useful is that it names the work rather than the personality. Bridging is not networking, and it is not programme management. It is the repeated, unglamorous labour of learning how a partner’s metrics, unwritten rules and power structure actually work, then speaking in their language without pretending the differences have gone away. The authors are careful to say that bridgers move between the three functions fluidly rather than in sequence, and that the relationships they build are what allow partners to take risks outside their own remit.
Their prescription for organisations is thinner than the diagnosis, and they know it. Firms are told to place bridgers in key innovation roles, to measure collective rather than individual contribution, and to give them air cover — the lab in their example was deliberately walled off from the CFO for two years so it could show traction before being judged on quarterly numbers. That is a real design choice, and an expensive one. It requires a sponsor senior enough to absorb the political cost, which is precisely what most innovation programmes lack.
Where I push back
Framing bridging as a capability quietly moves the argument from organisational design to individual talent. The authors themselves note that bridgers are easy to overlook precisely because they make others look good, and that superiors must deliberately surface and reward their contribution. That is not a matter of virtue; it is what happens when performance management measures only individual output. Telling firms to grow more bridgers while refusing to count bridging work in appraisals is a way of paying for coordination with goodwill.
Second, bridging is routinely dismissed as “just coordination”. The cases show the opposite: coordination is harder than the technical barrier. Technology can be bought. Trust cannot.
What it means from Japan
Japanese firms were historically strong at internal suriawase, the painstaking mutual adjustment between departments. Bridging to an outside startup or another industry is a different skill. Joint-research and capital-alliance contracts can be perfect on paper and still produce nothing, because nobody inside is tasked with learning the partner’s context, translating both sides into one set of metrics, and absorbing the blame when a bet fails. Seconded and dual-hatted employees already do that work in Japan, and it is exactly the work that Japanese HR systems fail to evaluate.
The honest limit of the piece is that bridging operates inside the strategy it is given. A bridger can make a partnership work; a bridger cannot make a badly chosen partnership worth having. The authors write about moving ideas from prototype to scale, not about choosing which ideas deserve to scale, and those are different jobs.
Who should read it
Leaders of alliances and new-business units, the people who design evaluation systems, and any middle manager who spends the week coordinating and cannot point to a single line of their own output.
Quotes
“At best, bringing multiple partners together results in splitting differences or making compromises, which can lead to mediocre results.”
“Organizations must ‘partner or die,’ as one executive told us.”
Source: Harvard Business Review, March–April 2026, pp.74–86 (Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, Jason Wild)