Supercharging Innovation with “Flash Teams”

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Across industries, organizations are struggling to move as quickly as they need to on key priorities and new initiatives. The solution for many, says Stanford's Melissa Valentine, might be "flash teams" -- project groups that can be instantly, efficiently, and cost-effectively brought together and organized via online labor markets and AI and other digital tools to solve any problem. She explains why companies and leaders should embrace this new type of collaboration, how flash teams work in practice, and the pitfalls to look out for. Valentine is coauthor along with Michael Bernstein of the book Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work.

Transcript

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0:44.2	Thank you. I'm Alison Beard.
1:00.7	And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR Idea cast.
1:10.5	Adi, do you remember back in 2022 when we were thinking about our first all-day live virtual leadership conference?
1:17.1	And we really didn't know what we were doing at all.
1:19.8	But we hired a freelance consultant and we pulled together people from around the company who were experts in various things.
1:27.2	You know, us in editorial, others in
1:28.9	marketing, product development, design, production. And then we actually put on the event a few months
1:34.7	later. Yeah, and it went really well. I remember that extremely well. And it's one of my best
1:39.3	experiences of HPR. And it was partly because, you know, it was an all-volunteer team pretty much of people
1:44.7	who had other jobs, but who came together for this really important task, and we pulled it off.
1:49.9	Yeah. So that is what our guest today would call a flash team. And she has studied groups like
1:56.1	this who are pulled together very quickly. They don't normally work together,
2:01.5	and they develop a camaraderie and teamwork.
	...

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