Scarcity is the Mother of all Innovation

An old Swedish saying goes something like "the need or scarcity is the mother of all invention" (nöden är alla uppfinningars moder). This popular truth happens to be evidence based.
Photo by codepinkhq Flickr CC

The need for scarcity

Uri Neren writes in a Harvard Business Review Blog post that there are 162 routes to innovation but only three are evidence based. The tree that are all points to scarcity as the value which spur innovation.

Frugality

A classic principle in the Total Quality Movement is that problems should be provoked. When all is running well, you speed up the production process to provoke errors that you can eliminate, when they are gone you have a new baseline of higher speed and productivity. The same is true for money.

When the company enjoys a good financial return - shareholders should take the money away. This may sound harsh but when waters are high you don't need to be good at navigation, this can easily be solved by lowering the water levels which will bring the rocks into play and demand higher expertise and thus productivity.

TRIZ

The russian scientist Genrich Altshuller who was condemned and sent to Gulag by Stalin, made an analysis of patents to identify the innovation principles behind each one of them. The method was called "The theory of inventive problem solving", which in Russian becomes TRIZ.

One of Altshuller's base principles is that invention stems from contradiction. The contradiction is what defines a problem, the conflict of interests if you will. This way of defining the conflict/contradiction as the source of invention interests me since the identification and elimination of conflict is a key principle of Open Management.

Corporate Social Responsibility

To find new innovative ways of doing more with less can surely be seen as Corporate Social Responsibility, to do it by seeking out and eliminating conflict in the organization, even more so.

At least that is my opinion, what do you think?