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The Hidden Power of Messy Teams

Johnathan Cromwell & Jean‐François Harvey

MIT Sloan Management Review2026https://doi.org/10.63383/fxye8059article
FT50AJG 3ABDC A
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

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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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.63383/fxye8059

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@article{johnathan2026,
  title        = {{The Hidden Power of Messy Teams}},
  author       = {Johnathan Cromwell & Jean‐François Harvey},
  journal      = {MIT Sloan Management Review},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.63383/fxye8059},
}

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The Hidden Power of Messy Teams

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.