Every person in the company (especially Innovation Managers) wants to be Batman. The one who spots the trend before anyone, swoops in, and saves the company from itself. I wanted it too.
But you cannot save a company you do not run. The business units can. So the hero was never going to be you.
That leaves the sidekick’s seat, which turns out to be the one that matters. When DC gave Batman a partner in 1940, it was not charity. Robin made Batman work, giving the brooding loner a way in for readers who could not relate to a millionaire in a cape, and a second pair of hands in the field.
Robin is the reason the hero keeps winning.
Now put that in a company.
Your business units are Batman: they need to own the customer, the P&L, and the win. They spend their days fighting this quarter’s number, which is exactly where you want them, and that same focus is the reason they cannot also focus on exploration. They cannot scan the horizon, run a real search for what comes next, scout the startups, or fund a bet that does not fit this year’s budget.
That is Robin’s job, and it is the whole point of a central innovation function. So you equip the hero instead, handing him what he cannot carry himself: a strategy for where to aim, external insights to stay awake, a method to run the scouting instead of guessing, the connections, the tools to move fast, and budget when the bet is real and the unit cannot carry it yet. You make the win possible, and you let them take it.
But why? Why you have to let your colleagues feel like Batman?
Gijs Van Wulfen said something on my podcast I keep coming back to.
The slowest animals of the herd determine the speed of your organization.
He means the most conservative person in the room. The one who folds his arms in the kickoff and asks who is going to pay for this. That person sets your pace, not the hero with the plan.
So the Batman move fails. You cannot drag the slow ones behind you, and arguing rarely moves them. You can win the meeting with better slides and one more benchmark from China, and still lose the room.
In corporate innovation the bottleneck is buy-in, not ideas. Gijs puts a number on it: roughly half of innovation projects die because the support disappears, not because the idea was weak. The idea was fine. The people were never on board.
And support rarely dies out loud. It dies quietly.
The unanswered email. The “let’s evaluate this first.” One more alignment call, one more expert, until a project that may change the process or the product dissolves into a committee. Fabrizio Conicella put it well in a recent post:
A decision wearing a process costume.
My own version is the stakeholder who never replies to your message, so he never has to admit he might need your help.
You will not talk that person out of his silence.
So stop trying to convince them. Give them something to be proud of.
People overvalue what they make with their own hands. Norton, Mochon and Ariely measured it and called it the IKEA effect: in their study, people paid 63% more for the furniture they had assembled themselves.2 Ownership does the convincing that argument cannot.
Hand a skeptic a finished plan and he will find the hole in it. Hand him one piece to build and he will defend it in the next board meeting as if it were his.
Because now it is.
This is the Robin job. Your value is not being the smartest person in the room about AI or robotics or whatever the project is. Kotter warned decades ago that change led by a single hero tends to stall. The work is quieter than that: get the slow people moving, because when they move, the company moves.
One catch, and it is where most of this breaks. You cannot pull it off from the middle alone. If the board watches from the side, the skeptics read that as permission to wait. You need a sponsor at the top who sits inside the process. Change is sponsored at the top and driven from the middle, and one without the other is theater.
Here is how I see it now.
You were never meant to be Batman. The business units are. They own the mission, they carry the risk, they take the credit. Your central role as Innovation function is to be Robin.
You do not do the innovating. You make it possible, then you step out of the frame.
By the way, when DC gave Batman a partner in 1940, the Batman comics doubled their sales. (Correlation is not Causation?!). The hero got more done and reached further because someone set up the shot and let him land the punch.
That is the job. Innovation is a service to the business, and it runs on shared ownership. Two capes, one mission.
You set them up, you let them be the hero, and the slow ones you were fighting end up holding the trophy. Which is exactly where you want them.
The speed of your organization is set by its slowest people. Hand them the cape, and they will make you move.
Thanks for reading this, see you next time!
Davide
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