There is a myth in business that creativity flourishes when resources are plentiful. Give people enough time, budget, and freedom, and the ideas will follow.
The evidence suggests it is more complicated than that.
When Constraints Spark Something Unexpected
In 2008, two designers in San Francisco were so broke they couldn’t pay their rent. To survive, they bought bulk cereal, repackaged it as limited-edition boxes called “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCains” to ride the US election wave, and sold them for $40 each. It raised enough money to keep their startup alive.
That startup was Airbnb.
The cereal stunt didn’t just solve a cash problem. It demonstrated something that would become central to Airbnb’s culture: the willingness to do unconventional, even absurd things when the conventional path isn’t available. No marketing budget meant no conventional marketing. What they had instead was resourcefulness, a sharp eye for the moment, and the creativity that comes from having no other option.
A 2025 Harvard Business School study of nearly 12,000 companies confirmed what Airbnb’s founders discovered by necessity. Companies that began with significant resource constraints were more likely to build products using unconventional approaches. Teams that received large initial budgets, by contrast, tended to become less inventive after deploying those resources.
The researchers attributed this to what they called “bricolage”, the French term for tinkering with what you have on hand. Scarcity forces you to combine available tools in ways you would never consider if you could simply buy a better one.
When Resources Become a Reason Not to Change
The other side of this is equally instructive.
Blockbuster was, for two decades, the dominant force in home entertainment. Thousands of stores, an enormous customer base, the resources to acquire almost any competitor or technology it chose. In the early 2000s, Netflix approached Blockbuster about a potential partnership. According to Netflix’s former CFO, Blockbuster’s leadership nearly laughed them out of the room.
It wasn’t that Blockbuster lacked the resources to adapt. It was that having so much to protect made the risk of changing feel larger than the risk of staying still. By 2010 it had filed for bankruptcy.
Netflix, which had spent years operating under severe constraints and building around them, became one of the most valuable entertainment companies in the world.
BlackBerry tells a similar story. It dominated business mobile communication through the 1990s and 2000s, and had every resource available to respond when touchscreens and app ecosystems began to reshape the market. It kept building around its physical keyboard. By 2016, it had exited the phone business entirely.
Abundant resources, in both cases, funded the defence of what already existed rather than the creation of what was needed next.
The Real Question Is Not How Much You Have
The Harvard research points to something leaders often overlook: the relationship between resources and creativity is not linear. More is not always better. Less is not always worse. What matters is whether the conditions you create encourage your team to think inventively or simply to execute within the comfort of what is already familiar.
Tight constraints can force the kind of lateral thinking that well-resourced teams rarely discover on their own. However, constraints without direction, support, or psychological safety produce stress, not creativity. On the other hand, abundance without genuine curiosity about what needs to change produces only more of the same.
The question worth asking is “Are we creating the conditions for genuinely new thinking, whatever our resources happen to be?”
A Note on What’s Coming
If you want to build that capacity in your team, BEP’s in-house Creativity and Innovation workshops are open for bookings from January 2027. Drop me a message at hanniz@bestevents-asia.com if you’d like to explore what this could look like for your organisation.