From the HBR blog comes this link to a fascinating study on innovation.  I’ve always held that resource constraints help – not hinder – innovation, but this study goes way beyond a mere hunch:

How should an enterprise go about inventing something novel and useful? Is there a structured thinking process that reliably produces results? Believe it or not, at least 162 different answers have been proposed to that question.

So when it happens that these rigorously researched methodologies independently converge on a common factor — something they all find valuable in an innovation process — it’s pretty safe to assume that it really is important. Having done that kind of meta-analysis, we can tell you the one element that comes through loudest and clearest: the value of scarcity as a spur to creative problem-solving.

via The Number One Key to Innovation: Scarcity – Uri Neren – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.