Innovation happens when creativity is constrained, as it always is.

We tend to think of creativity as a blank sheet, filled with unlimited potential, with the capacity to become anything. And this is true, however the artist's work is constrained by her skills as an artist, her courage to produce, the colors available, the size of the canvas, the amount of sleep she's had, her health, patience and prior emotional trauma and current maturity (plus an almost infinite array of other factors).

The painting we see, the creative act of making something from nothing ended up as the emergent result of pure potential filtered through the real, and in this case mostly unacknowledged, constraints and limitations. Not all limitations are the product of scarcity thinking.

And so it is with all innovation. Many constraints are personal, some cultural and others resources. But all shape and influence the final creative product, be it a report, book, painting, product or strategy.

Innovation depends on acknowledging and honoring the real, dissolving the artificial and transcending the relative. And wisdom I guess lies in working out which is which.