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. For most leaders, the ideal high-functioning team operates with smooth collaboration guided by a clear goal that was agreed upon at the outset. Researchers studying the innovation process have also found this model to be particularly important for helping teams communicate better, coordinate tasks, and resolve conflicts as they explore diverse ideas and develop novel solutions to a problem. Or so we thought. Our research set out to test the assumption that defining a clear problem at the beginning of...
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