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Necessity, not Scarcity, is the Mother of Invention

March 25, 2011

Bravo for companies that are starting to focus on innovation again! It’s about time. But even with this renewed attention to innovation, some managers keep projects resource-starved, in the belief that scarcity drives creative invention. Although ingenuity can sometimes spring up when means are scarce, managers beware: It is a dangerous miscalculation to think that starving innovators will feed innovation.

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