Creativity

The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage

February 20, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re an entrepreneur entering a new market with a product or service that nobody else offers, you’ll seek the first-mover advantage.

You’ll move quickly to get established as a market leader. If your business idea has the potential to succeed, other entrepreneurs are possibly working on it at the same time or will be quick to emulate when they see what you’re doing.
You’ll validate your concepts quickly by identifying and partnering with a few enthusiastic “guinea pig” customers who can test your product or service early on and give you feedback regarding what customers really want.
You’ll create some barriers (“establish an economic moat” in Warren Buffett-speak) to inhibit other aspirants from entering the market—you’ll secure patents on your intellectual property, lock-in key locations, or negotiate longer-term contracts with customers.

Alas, many first-mover advantages are not sustainable, and many first-movers are as successful as what the superstars will have you believe.

First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage New ventures have higher failure rates than more established businesses.

Creating market awareness, sustaining market acceptance, fending away aggressive competitors are often easier said than done for many new ventures, not to mention lining up suppliers and distributors. Besides, unless you’re well-capitalized by patient investors, you’re likely to face higher-than-foreseen marketing costs on top of lower-than-anticipated sales.

Instead, if you are the second—or later—entrepreneur to market, you’ll stand a better chance of success by learning from the forerunner’s mistakes. You’ll also earn better credence from your customers, suppliers, distributors, employees, and investors to help create a better product or service.

Idea for Impact: There’s an American adage that “many pioneers died with arrows in their backs.” The best time for an entrepreneur to offer a new product or service is after others have already gotten there and laid some groundwork.

Why Brainwriting is Better than Brainstorming for Rapid Idea Generation

February 8, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most brainstorming sessions suck. Facilitators aren’t often skilled enough to direct the creative process and overcome interpersonal and intrapersonal barriers to idea-generation. Participants are not as organized as they need to be. One or two “meeting-hogs,” who lack self-awareness and self-control, dominate the conversations with their pet ideas and shut everyone else down. And then there’s groupthink and self-censorship based on responses to earlier suggestions by others. Consequently, bold ideas seldom survive a group discussion.

If you want to buck the odds, try “brainwriting” instead of brainstorming.

In its simplest form, brainwriting has the participants quietly reflect upon an open-ended prompt of appropriate scope, for example, “how could we improve our design process,” and write down their ideas. A group leader can organize the responses by combining identical ideas, grouping thematically-related ideas, and posting them on a wall for the group to appraise them further. Then, the participants vote on their favorites, and the top ‘n’ number of ideas or priorities are identified for future discussion and exploration.

Idea for Impact: Teams Don’t Think—Individuals Do

In essence, brainwriting isolates idea generation from the instantaneous discussion and evaluation that can hamper the creative process.

Brainwriting, when followed by discussion, combines the benefits of both individual and group creativity. Studies have repeatedly shown that people think of more new—and practical—ideas on their own than they do in a group.

In my experience, this creative thinking process is inclusionary, engaging, time-effective, non-judgmental, and mostly free from pressures to conform to others’ ideas. Brainwriting is particularly useful with a group of people who are reserved and would be unlikely to offer many ideas in an open group session.

Inspirational Mess, Creative Clutter

January 27, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Biographer Roland Penrose (1900–84) writes in Picasso: His Life and Work (1958,)

Disorder was to Picasso a happier breeding ground for ideas than the perfection of a tidy room in which nothing upset the equilibrium by being out of place.

Once when visiting Picasso at his flat in the rue la Boétie, I noticed that a large Renoir hanging over the fireplace was crooked. “It’s better like that,” he said. “If you want to kill a picture, all you have to do is to hang it beautifully on a nail and soon you will see nothing of it but the frame. When it’s out of place you see it better.”

Pablo Picasso - Embrace the Imperfections Creativity Studies suggest that, for some people, messiness can boost creativity by spurring inspiration flow and helping them explore different avenues. One researcher explained, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights.”

But don’t use this concept as a crutch to defend your clutter.

What James Watt and the Steam Engine Teach Us about Creativity and Invention

December 9, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

The arc of development of the technique to harness the properties of steam to power mechanical devices embodies the notion that “necessity is the mother of invention” (Latin: “necessitas ingenium dedit.”)

Towards the end of the 17th century, Britain faced the problem of pumping and draining water out of mine shafts. In response, the military engineer Thomas Savery (1650–1715) invented an “engine to raise water by fire” in 1698. However, the “Savery Pump” was limited in practical usage to 20–25 feet of suction. Savery’s rudimentary pressurized boiler was liable to explode, particularly under high-pressure steam (over 8 to 10 atmospheres.)

Independently, and later in partnership with Savery, blacksmith Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729) developed the more practical—and more successful—atmospheric-pressure piston engine in 1698. Newcomen’s engine solved the limitation of the Savery Pump by having atmospheric pressure push the cylinder’s piston down after the condensation of steam had created a vacuum in the cylinder. Therefore, the pressure of the steam did not limit the intensity of pressure.

For five decades, Newcomen’s engine was the most complex technological object of its time anywhere in the world.

Difficulties Compel People to Found Creative Solutions to Problems

James Watt and the Steam Engine: Necessity is the Mother of Invention Then came along the Scottish instrument maker James Watt (1736–1819.) At age 21, Watt opened a shop in 1757 at the Glasgow University to make quadrants, compasses, scales, and other mathematical instruments.

Watt was tasked with repairing a Newcomen Engine at the university for a lecture-demonstration. He initially had difficulty getting the Newcomen Engine to work because its parts were poorly constructed. When he finally had it running, he was surprised at its efficiency. However, the engine was constantly running out of coal because every cycle required the heating and the cooling of the cylinder, thus resulting in a large waste of energy.

In 1769, Watt devised a system whereby the cylinder and the condenser were separate, making it unnecessary to heat and cool the cylinder with each stroke. Watt’s invention of the separate-condenser steam engine (also called the “double-acting” steam engine) decreased fuel costs by 75 percent.

Watt’s “steam engine” was able to produce continuous rotary motion and expanded its use far beyond pumping water. Continuous rotary motion sparked the transition from hand-production methods to machine-power and became the driving force of the Industrial Revolution. Playwright George Bernard Shaw even declared in Man and Superman (1903,) “those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine.”

The steam engine continued to power industry and transportation during much of the 19th century and early 20th century, at the same time as engineers developed the internal-combustion engine. Towards the end of the 19th century, with the invention of the first practical steam turbine by English engineer Charles Parsons (1854–1931,) turbines started replacing reciprocating steam engines in power stations.

Reference: Richard L. Hills’s Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (1989.)

Many Businesses Get Started from an Unmet Personal Need

October 21, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Many successful entrepreneurs never set out with the goal of launching a large company, let alone hiring scores of people. They are motivated enough to develop solutions to a direct problem they are facing. Before long, they discover that they are not the only ones with that problem—and, like so, a successful business is born.

How “The Cult of Lulu” Got Started

How 'The Cult of Lulu' Got Started Consider the genesis of Lululemon, the Canadian athletic apparel company (from The Atlantic‘s narrative of how sports changed the way Americans dress.)

In 1997, a retail entrepreneur in British Columbia named Chip Wilson was having back problems. So, like millions of people around the world, he went to a yoga class. What struck Wilson most in his first session wasn’t the poses; it was the pants. He noticed that his yoga instructor was wearing some slinky dance attire, the sort of second skin that makes a fit person’s butt look terrific. Wilson felt inspired to mass-produce this vision of posterior pulchritude. The next year, he started a yoga design-and-fashion business and opened his first store in Vancouver. It was called Lululemon.

[Yes, that’s the Chip Wilson who gained notoriety for blaming in-poor-shape women for ruining their Lululemon yoga pants by rubbing their thighs together too much. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for it [his apparel],” he condescendingly declared on Bloomberg TV.]

At present, Lululemon has the highest sales-per-square-foot of any American apparel retailer. Its pricey workout clothing has become a wardrobe staple, prompting other retailers to launch competing apparel lines to cash in on the growing market.

Lululemon kindled the prevailing fixation on a healthy appearance. Its brand continues to be an elite fitness status symbol for the skinny and wealthy set. More broadly, over the last two decades, Lululemon has redefined how the current generation dresses and lives. The company pioneered the “athleisure” fashion revolution, which has blurred the lines between yoga-and-spin-class outfits and regular street clothes.

Sara Blakely’s Personal Undertaking Morphed Spanx into a Big Business

Sara Blakely's entrepreneurial journey for Spanx In a similar vein, entrepreneur Sara Blakely started the Spanx hosiery company after searching for a solution to improve the way she looked in a pair of her cream-colored pants. Blakely started her wildly successful entrepreneurial journey by making sure that the specific type of undergarment she ideated to solve her clothing problem did materialize commercially. From her biography on Wikipedia,

Forced to wear pantyhose in the hot Floridian climate for her sales role, Blakely disliked the appearance of the seamed foot while wearing open-toed shoes, but liked the way that the control-top model eliminated panty lines and made her body appear firmer. For her attendance at a private party, she experimented by cutting off the feet of her pantyhose while wearing them under a new pair of slacks and found that the pantyhose continuously rolled up her legs, but she also achieved the desired result.

Idea for Impact: Learn to Pay Attention to the Subtle Clues to Opportunities All-Around

Many entrepreneurs initially got their start by first recognizing and responding to a personal need or a localized problem and later discovering that they struck a universal chord.

If you want to become an entrepreneur, find out if you can solve a problem that you’ve personally experienced. Uncover opportunities that you may otherwise have missed by asking, “Does this have to be time-consuming, arduous, expensive, or annoying?” “How can I improve on this?” and “Can I do this better or different from the other fellow doing it over there?” Then expand your opportunity by asking, “Who else may be experiencing the same problem?”

Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?

July 24, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Akio Morita, the visionary co-founder of Sony, liked to tell a story about recognizing opportunities and shaping them into business concepts.

Two shoe salesmen … find themselves in a rustic backward part of Africa. The first salesman wires back to his head office: “There is no prospect of sales. Natives do not wear shoes!” The other salesman wires: “No one wears shoes here. We can dominate the market. Send all possible stock.”

Morita, along with his co-founder Masaru Ibuka, was a genius at creating consumer products for which no obvious demand existed, and then generating demand for them. Sony’s hits included such iconic products as a hand-held transistor radio, the Walkman portable audio cassette player, the Diskman portable compact disk player, and the Betamax videocassette recorder.

Products Lost in Translation

As the following case studies will illustrate, many companies haven’t had Sony’s luck in launching products that can stir up demand.

In each case in point, deeply ingrained cultural attitudes affected how consumers failed to embrace products introduced into their respective markets.

Case Study #1: Nestlé’s Paloma Iced Tea in India

Marketing and Product Introduction Failure: Nestle's Paloma Iced Tea in India When Swiss packaged food-multinational Nestlé introduced Paloma iced tea in India in the ’80s, Nestlé’s market assessment was that the Indian beverage market was ready for an iced tea variety.

Sure thing, folks in India love tea. They consume it multiple times a day. However, they must have it hot—even in the heat of the summer. Street-side tea vendors are a familiar sight in India. Huddled around the chaiwalas are patrons sipping hot tea and relishing a savory samosa or a saccharine jalebi.

It’s no wonder, then, that, despite all the marketing efforts, Paloma turned out to be a debacle. Nestlé withdrew the product within a year.

Case Study #2: Kellogg’s Cornflakes in India

The American packaged foods multinational Kellogg’s failed in its initial introduction of cornflakes into the Indian market in the mid ’90s. Kellogg’s quickly realized that its products were alien to Indians’ consumption habits—accustomed to traditional hot, spicy, and heavy grub, the Indians felt hungry after eating a bowl of sweet cornflakes for breakfast. In addition, they poured hot milk over cornflakes rendering them soggy and less appetizing.

Case Study #3: Oreo Cookies in China

Marketing and Product Introduction Case Study: Oreo Green-tea Ice Cream Cookies in China When Kraft Foods, launched Oreo in China in 1996, America’s best-loved sandwich cookie didn’t fare very well. Executives in Kraft’s Chicago headquarters expected to just drop the American cookie into the Chinese market and watch it fly off shelves.

Chinese consumers found that Oreos were too sweet. The ritual of twisting open Oreo cookies, licking the cream inside, and then dunking it in milk before enjoying them was considered a “strangely American habit.”

Not until Kraft’s local Chinese leaders developed a local concept—a wafer format in subtler flavors such as green-tea ice cream—did Oreo become popular.

Idea for Impact: Your expertise may not translate in unfamiliar and foreign markets

In marketing, if success is all about understanding the consumers, you must be grounded in the reality of their lives to be able to understand their priorities.

Don’t assume that what makes a product successful in one market will be a winning formula in other markets as well.
Make products resonate with local cultures by contextualizing the products and tailoring them for local preferences.
Use small-scale testing to make sure your product can sway buyers.

Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

November 1, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Seek fresh eyes. Ask new employees and interns to make a note of every question they have about how things get done in your organization. If anything—reports, approvals, meetings, reviews—doesn’t seem sensible, let them record those inefficiencies. After a few weeks, when they’ve become familiar with the organization and its workflow, have them reassess and report their observations. The best improvement ideas come from people who aren’t stuck in the established ways.
Notice something? Fix it quickly or delegate. Never walk absentmindedly by something that could be improved. A cluttered instruments cabinet in a warehouse? A loose tile in a walkway? A broken link on your customer service website? Don’t take inconveniences and unpleasant situations for granted.
Explore the outsider’s perspective. Notice how trivial stuff can really frustrate you when you’re standing in line at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles or dealing with a slow bureaucracy? While running errands, do others’ rules, regulations, and procedures annoy you? Bump into something that doesn’t have to be laborious, arduous, expensive, or annoying, but is? Examine if your business imposes any of those inconveniences on your customers.
Make it easy for customers to complain. Seek customer feedback in such a way that it encourages people to share their negative experiences. As I’ve illuminated before, many innovative ideas have their roots in prudent attention to and empathy with customers’ experiences.

Idea for Impact: Problem-finding is one of the most significant—and overlooked—parts of innovation. Learn to pay attention to the subtle clues to opportunities all around.

Creativity by Imitation: How to Steal Others’ Ideas and Innovate

October 22, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Innovation by Imitation: Many Innovations Come from the Outside---How Henry Ford Developed the Moving Assembly Line for the Model T

Emulating others’ ideas is an underappreciated learning tool. Many creative innovators set forth as remarkably astute mimics of others. “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” prods a creator’s maxim often misattributed to Picasso.

Imitation is a leading pathway to business innovation, even if being an imitator is anchored by a sense of derision. Ever more businesses are nicking great ideas wherever they can obtain them—in their own industries or beyond. Hospitals have adapted safety and efficiency procedures from the military and the airline industry. Aircraft manufacturers have adopted the car industry’s lean supply chain management concepts. Ritz-Carlton, the luxury chain of hotels and resorts, runs the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center that has helped trained its legendary cult of customer service and employee empowerment best practices to managers from companies across industries.

Creativity by Taking Existing Ideas: Applying Them in a New Context

The most prominent example of innovating by imitation is Ford’s development of the automobile assembly line—a system Henry Ford copied (and improved) from the Chicago meat processing business.

Innovation by Imitation: Genesis of the Moving Assembly Line Henry Ford’s relentless ambition to build his Model T a high-volume-low-cost automobile, together with his engineering knowledge and manufacturing experience provided the leadership and creative environment that nurtured the development of the moving mechanical assembly line. Today, the moving assembly line is the epitome of manufacturing. Almost everything that is now industrially manufactured—automobiles, aircrafts, toys, furniture, food—passes down assembly lines before landing in our homes and offices.

The genesis of the moving assembly line is in the American agricultural products industry. During the late 18th century, the movement of grains changed from hand labor to belts and later moving hoppers.

Innovation by Imitation: Many Innovations Come from the Outside

Innovation by Imitation: Chicago Slaughter Houses Pioneered the Moving Disassembly Line Before Henry Ford Started His Assembly Line By 1873, Chicago’s meat-processing industry adapted belts and hoppers to transform beef and pork production into a standardized, mechanized, and centralized business. After cows and pigs travelled to their fate in train cars from farms throughout the Midwest, they were dropped into hoppers and killed. Conveyor belts then moved carcasses past meat cutters, who progressively removed various sections of the animal, cut them into appropriate sizes, and repackaged and dispatched processed meat across the United States.

The meat processors’ task was disassembly (as opposed to putting together automobile parts in Ford’s plants.) Each worker had a specific, specialized job. Production moved swiftly. The American writer Upton Sinclair famously described this industry’s ghastly working conditions in his acclaimed novel The Jungle and said, “They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”

Chicago Slaughter Houses Were the Pioneers of the Moving Disassembly Line Before Henry Ford Started His Assembly Line

In the early 1900s, when Henry Ford wanted to keep Model T production up with demand and lower the price, Ford’s team explored other industries and found four ideas that could advance their goal: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and cutting wasted effort. Ford’s engineers visited Swift & Company’s Slaughterhouse in Chicago and decided to adopt the “disassembly line” method to build automobiles.

The introduction of the moving assembly line process in 1913 enabled increased production up to 1,000 Model Ts a day and decreased assembly time from 13 hours to 93 minutes. Additional refinement of the process, thanks to reliable precision equipment and standardized shop practices, shortened production time radically: within a few years, a new Model T rolled off the assembly line every 24 seconds. First produced in 1908, the Model T kept the same design until the final one—serial number 15,000,000 rolled off the line in 1927.

Auschwitz-Birkenau and Victims of the Holocaust

Sadly, just as Henry Ford copied the Chicago meat processing and perfected the moving assembly line, the Nazi apparatus copied Ford’s methods of mass production to massacre six million people. While Midwestern butchers processed the livestock carcasses, the Nazis systematically handled corpses of the victims of the Holocaust. Nazi operatives removed victims’ hair, clothing, shoes, gold teeth, hairbrushes, glasses, suitcases, and anything of value to be repurposed for the Reich. The atrocities of this inexpressibly shocking disaster are on display at the train tracks and the museums of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland.

Formal Strategic-Benchmarking Programs

Smart businesses have formal strategic-benchmarking programs to achieve significant efficiency improvements: they pinpoint the strategic capabilities that matter most to their businesses, seek out companies or businesses that currently manage those capabilities best, and try to copy and deploy those capabilities as rapidly as possible. But time is of the essence for the success of these undertakings, as the management guru Tom Peters warns,

I hate Benchmarking! Benchmarking is stupid! Why is it stupid? Because we pick the current industry leader and then we launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whoever was best five years ago, five years from now. Which to me is not an Olympian aspiration.

Imitation is a Key Characteristic of Highly Creative People: The Case of Steve Jobs Copying from Xerox

One of the key characteristics of highly creative people is their exposure to and experience with working in several related domains. They are very good at crossing domain boundaries, relating their creativeness in new and perhaps unexpected ways, and adapting knowledge into new domains. The following case of one of history’s most famous innovators illustrates this distinguishing characteristic.

Steve Jobs of Apple introduced the revolutionary Lisa computer in 1983. It featured such innovations as the graphical user interface, a mouse, and document-centric computing. Jobs had taken—and refined—all these inventions from Xerox’s PARC research labs and introduced by Xerox on its commercially-unsuccessful Alto and Star computers in 1981. The biographer Walter Isaacson writes in his best-selling Steve Jobs: “The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry.” Isaacson cites Jobs: “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas… They [Xerox management] were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do… Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.”

Innovation by Imitation: Steve Jobs of Apple copied Xerox's PARC innovations in graphical user interface, a mouse, and document-centric computing

Idea for Impact: Borrow Ideas from Others and Combine Them with Your Own Creativity

Interestingly, many “benchmarking” exercises in the world of business—even academia—do not come “top-down” out of strategy. In other words, innovations by imitation are typically not driven from the top down. Instead, they materialize from everyday operational challenges—those painful experiences that send managers scuttling for solutions in a hurry.

Look outside your industry. To improve your creativity, try spending time researching other smart companies—even those outside of your industry. Learning directly from other companies is a useful, underutilized form of research for finding ways to improve performance.

Attend to developments at your competitors and in other industries. Look for potential opportunities that have been discovered elsewhere. Avoid the “not invented here” syndrome—don’t reject other’s great ideas. Keep an open mind.

Disproven Hypotheses Are Useful Too

June 21, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Hypotheses are conjectures—often merely proposals or intuitions—about what may constitute facts.

A specific hypothesis can be tested for its adequacy and proved correct or incorrect using the scientific method. Sometimes, a hypothesis is accepted for the time being, until further evidence suggests an amendment.

It does not matter if a certain hypothesis is proven incorrect because, in itself, the falsification of a hypothesis can offer precious insight about the “what is not” to enhance the “what is.”

Hypotheses are the bedrock of scholarship. Scientific understanding accrues when many interrelated and tested hypotheses are used to develop theories, and rethink and restructure our knowledge.

Turning a Minus Into a Plus … Constraints are Catalysts for Innovation

November 29, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Creativity Thrives Best When Constrained

“Art consists in limitation,” as the English writer G. K. Chesterton remarked. Constraints are the sine qua non of creativity.

One of the great ironies of creative thinking is that it seems to benefit from constraints. At first blush, inventive thinking may seem to require a great degree of freedom and a lack of restrictions, but the reality of the creative process is that it is frequently entwined with many challenging constraints and intractable requirements. In the right light, demanding constraints can truly be blessings in disguise as the French poet Paul Valery observed, “A person is a poet if his imagination is stimulated by the difficulties inherent in his art and not if his imagination is dulled by them.”

Constraints can shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Constraints stimulate creativity because they not only invigorate inventive thinking but also reduce the complexity of the problem at hand. That is to say, constraints can make a problem more controllable, and possibly even more appealing.

Constraints and Challenge Can Actually Be Assets to the Creative Process

When you explore inventions that are creative, you’ll discover that the creators often exploited some core constraints that had characterized their domain in the past. Here are six examples of creativity that exploited a constraint to great advantage.

In 1986, British Airways ran a “Go for it, America!” marketing campaign to give away 5,200 free seats—all seats on its scheduled flights between USA and UK on June 10, 1986. In response, the upstart Virgin Atlantic ran its own newspaper advertisements that declared, “It has always been Virgin’s policy to encourage you to fly to London for as little as possible. So on June 10 we encourage you to fly British Airways.” And in smaller type, the ad read, “As for the rest of the year, we look forward to seeing you aboard Virgin Atlantic. For the best service possible. At the lowest possible fare.” The British Airways giveaway generated a lot of publicity, but most of the news coverage also mentioned Virgin’s unexpected, witty response.
In October 1984, during the second presidential debate with challenger Walter Mondale, Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun questioned President Ronald Reagan about his age: “You already are the oldest President in history, and some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall, yes, that President Kennedy, who had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuba missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?” Reagan famously replied, “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Tyrwhitt responded, “Mr. President, I’d like to head for the fence and try to catch that one before it goes over.” Mondale lost and Reagan got elected for his second term as President. [See YouTube clip of this debate.]
An determined young woman I knew was embarking on a career as a new architect. She had set her sights on a job with a prominent architectural firm, but her professors and career councilors urged her to gain experience at a smaller employer first, as no prestigious firm would take on an inexperienced, new graduate. Undeterred, the young woman applied to the firm she had set her sights for. When asked about her experience, she declared slickly, “I have no experience at all. You see, I want to learn this business at a top quality firm. Employ me and mentor me to suit your design practices. This way, I’ll not have to unlearn any of the second-rate skills I’d have learned in another place.” She got the job.
When YouTube launched in 2005, many of its upstart competitors examined each uploaded video for copyright infringement. However, unlike its competitors, YouTube calculatedly let users upload any content and waited for copyright owners to complain before taking down noncompliant videos. By choosing to put their business model at risk, YouTube rapidly grew in content and viewers. Its early rivals faded out, and YouTube got acquired by Google and went on to became the world’s leading video-sharing platform.
Legend has it that one day, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) had only blue paint to work with. When he started toying with the effects of painting with one color, he discovered the potential to produce interesting paintings that conveyed a sense of melancholy. Picasso had just relocated to Paris and was deeply affected by a close friend and fellow artist’s suicide. Art historians believe this event marked the onset of Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–1904,) during which he produced many stoic and sentimental paintings in mostly monochromatic shades of blue and blue-green. In what would become the hallmark of this greatest artist of the 20th century, Picasso leveraged an apparent constraint into an unintended creative outcome.
When American sculptor Janet Echelman‘s art supplies never arrived to South India on a Fulbright scholarship trip, Echelman altered her plans and started working with bronze casts inspired by the local materials and culture of Mahabalipuram, fishing village famous for sculpture. However, she soon found the material too heavy and expensive for her Fulbright budget. While examining fishermen bundling their nets one evening, Echelman began speculating if nets could be a new approach to sculpture. However, the delicate surfaces of the fishnets revealed every ripple of wind. Echelman hoisted the fishnets onto poles and created sturdy volumetric forms without heavy, solid materials. Echelman’s building-sized constructed net art structures are now featured in many cities around the world. [See Janet Echelman’s TED talk.]

In each situation, the inventor reframed elements of his/her world that he/she couldn’t control.

When faced with an element of the situation that they cannot ignore or overcome, instead of tackling those problems head-on, creative folks tend to leverage their constraints in a creative way and reframe them into an exceptionally powerful problem-solving technique.

Idea for Impact: Constraints often stimulate creativity rather than suppress it.

The heart of many a problem lies in what seems to be a single, intractable element. When that’s the case, instead of asking, “how can I minimize this liability?” explore “how can I make the most of it?”

Creativity

First-to-Market is often First-to-Fail

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Idea for Impact: Teams Don’t Think—Individuals Do

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Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Difficulties Compel People to Found Creative Solutions to Problems

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How “The Cult of Lulu” Got Started

Sara Blakely’s Personal Undertaking Morphed Spanx into a Big Business

Idea for Impact: Learn to Pay Attention to the Subtle Clues to Opportunities All-Around

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Products Lost in Translation

Case Study #1: Nestlé’s Paloma Iced Tea in India

Case Study #2: Kellogg’s Cornflakes in India

Case Study #3: Oreo Cookies in China

Idea for Impact: Your expertise may not translate in unfamiliar and foreign markets

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Creativity by Taking Existing Ideas: Applying Them in a New Context

Innovation by Imitation: Many Innovations Come from the Outside

Chicago Slaughter Houses Were the Pioneers of the Moving Disassembly Line Before Henry Ford Started His Assembly Line

Formal Strategic-Benchmarking Programs

Imitation is a Key Characteristic of Highly Creative People: The Case of Steve Jobs Copying from Xerox

Idea for Impact: Borrow Ideas from Others and Combine Them with Your Own Creativity

Wondering what to read next?

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Creativity Thrives Best When Constrained

Constraints and Challenge Can Actually Be Assets to the Creative Process

Idea for Impact: Constraints often stimulate creativity rather than suppress it.

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