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The Hidden Power of Messy Teams
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The Hidden Power of Messy Teams

by Johnathan R. Cromwell, Jean-François Harvey
March 2026
Intermediate
6 pages
17m
English
MIT Sloan Management Review

Overview

Conventional wisdom holds that innovation teams should begin their project with a clearly defined problem in order to increase their likelihood of success. However, a study of hundreds of ad hoc teams that formed to participate in a large global company’s annual innovation competition found that those with ambiguous problem definitions at the outset who were able to clarify the problems by the project’s midpoint had a greater chance of seeing their innovations successfully implemented.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 53863MIT67322