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Analysis shows that teams with unclear problems can innovate better when they clarify them later, highlighting versatility.
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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Cromwell et al. (2026) studied this question.
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