Constraints Drive Creativity
Often in large companies when there is a problem the 'solution' is to throw more bodies at the problem. Need new ideas? - add more people. Need to get work done faster? - add more people. Need to increase the product offering? - add more people. The problem is that the 'add more people' solution rarely if ever solves the problem (often it makes it worse), but it does require the least amount of creative thinking to execute. However, to add bodies, requires capital. In startups capital is precious and often times 'add more people' isn't an option, but the problem still needs to be solved. A capital constraint alone can drive some very creative thinking. At first you may come up with ideas such as outsourcing, and possibly short term consultants but if you drive further, you would be amazed at what you can come up with. For instance here are a few that we have found, thought about, experimented with and/or executed:
- internships that are sponsored by the school
- code competitions with the price a shot at working for your company
- open-sourced initiatives that is a win with for both the community and the company
- hackathons
- get your VC/board members to help
- friends and family home-sourcing
- Web based services (eg Mechanical Turk, various testing services etc)
- cloud computing
One of the best articles I have ever read on constraint driven thinking is a 2006 Booz&Co article entitled The Innovation Sandbox by C.K. Prahalad. I reference the examples in this article often in discussions about constraints and creativity in business models. Called the sandbox approach because it involves fairly complex, free-form exploration and even playful experimentation (the sand, with its flowing, shifting boundaries) within extremely fixed specified constraints (the walls, straight and rigid, that box in the sandbox
In this article Prahalad talks about serving the bottom on the economic pyramid and using this as a constraint in developing products that are good enough in the Indian health care market. This leads me to a second article from Wired that I often reference: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just fine by Robert Capps. However the difference in this article is that while the products may support the bottom of the pyramid from the economic buying power viewpoint, other levels of the pyramid who could afford more, often choose not to. This shift in behaviour is allowing constraint based thinking to actually accelerate product and business innovation through feature constraints in the digital marketplace. This is being adopted strongly in the web space, with early adopters of this model like 37Signals and their SaaS based applications (Basecamp, highrise etc).
Finally, there is the current thinking around the concept of Minimum Viable Product defined in The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development as 'A product with the fewest number of features needed to achieve a specific objective, and users are willing to 'pay' in some form of scarce resource''... which is essentially constraint based thinking around your business and your product to drive rapid feedback loops. What's really interesting is the shift in consumer behavior towards greater acceptance of less than perfect, which will lead to more and more creative innovations available to us.
