Based on the blog post, and without knowledge of the underlying foam that they were trying to replicate, I would say that a crucial distinction here is that the

Based on the blog post, and without knowledge of the underlying foam that they were trying to replicate, I would say that a crucial distinction here is that the first team was asked to create something new, which meant that many different inventions achieved by different paths were enough to get the job done. The second team was asked to produce a much more precisely specified thing, which may only have been possible to make with one process. So the two teams had different tasks, and the difference is not implicit vs process. It's many ways to many things, vs few ways to one thing. The latter problem sounds much harder to me.