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.
Cromwell et al. (Tue,) studied this question.