Limits drive innovation – limitless creative processes open the lid for complacency which disincentivizes research and radical thought.
Acar et al 19 [Oguz A. Acar is a Chair in Marketing at King's Business School, King's College London He is also a Research Affiliate at Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University, an Expert (in Behavioural Sciences and Innovation) at World Economic Forum and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). Murat Tarakci is Professor of Innovation Strategy at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Daan van Knippenberg is Houston Endowed Professor of Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University. His areas of expertise include leadership, diversity and inclusion, team performance, and creativity and innovation. “Why Constraints Are Good for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, 11/22/2019, https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-constraints-are-good-for-innovation, accessed 7/22/2023] junkwon
Recent surveys show that managers tend to consider compliance restrictions and a lack of resources as the main obstacles to innovation. This common wisdom suggests eradicating all constraints: by getting rid of rules and boundaries, creativity, and innovative thinking will thrive. Our research, however, challenges this wisdom and suggests that managers can innovate better by embracing constraints. We reviewed 145 empirical studies on the effects of constraints on creativity and innovation, and found that individuals, teams, and organizations alike benefit from a healthy dose of constraints. It is only when the constraints become too high that they stifle creativity and innovation.¶ As a simple illustration of the principle, consider GE Healthcare’s MAC 400 Electrocardiograph (ECG), which revolutionized rural access to medical care. The product was the outcome of a formidable set of constraints imposed on GE engineers: develop an ECG device that boasts the latest technology, costs no more than $1 per scan, is ultra portable to reach rural communities (i.e, should be lightweight and fit into a backpack), and is battery operated. The engineers were given just 18 months and a budget of $500,000 – a very modest budget by GE’s standards, given that development of its predecessor cost $5.4 million. Our research suggests that GE engineers were not successful despite these constraints, but because of them. Constraints can foster innovation when they represent a motivating challenge and focus efforts on a more narrowly defined way forward.¶ According to the studies we reviewed, when there are no constraints on the creative process, complacency sets in, and people follow what psychologists call the path-of-least-resistance – they go for the most intuitive idea that comes to mind rather than investing in the development of better ideas. Constraints, in contrast, provide focus and a creative challenge that motivates people to search for and connect information from different sources to generate novel ideas for new products, services, or business processes.¶ Therefore, managers can embrace and use a variety of constraints in their arsenal. These constraints take three main forms. First, they can limit inputs (e.g., time, human capital, funds, excess cash, and available materials). For example, managers may intentionally cap resources in corporate entrepreneurship initiatives to motivate employees to be more resourceful. Second, they can enforce specific processes. Examples include procedures on seeking early market and technological feedback (e.g., lean start-up model), guidelines on how small cross-functional work teams should interact (e.g., agile management approaches), or rules for brainstorming. Third, they can set specific output requirements such as product or service specifications. For example, Apple’s former Design Chief Jonathan Ive is known to have imposed use of scratch-resistant aluminosilicate glass during the design of iPhone 4.