Breakthrough Budgets

Nope. Sam Raimi made the original Evil Dead film for a fraction under $100,000 and it's still one of the better-looking horror movies of recent times, and I remember a great interview with him - about 3 years before Spiderman - where he explained some of the tricks he came up with to get around financial constraints.

For example: Don't have the bucks for a steadicam? Use physics - strap your camera to a ten-foot-long plank and let the distance between your two camera ops smooth out the bumps for you.

This experience served him well on Spiderman - yes, it's megabudget but it focuses on actors, plot and storyline, not effects, and nary a frame of celluloid goes to waste. Whereas another Marvel adap, Fantastic Four, blew quite a flaming chunk of change and delivered lukewarm box office and frosty reviews.

Just because you've got the budget to do something doesn't necessarily mean you should. (This means you, George Lucas...) Whereas having a tight but not impossibly tight budget forces you to think in inventive new ways.

Yes, constraints catalyze creativity, Heath.

But in our experience, it's not exactly like that.

If you're being creative for the benefit of business (creating value, generating revenue, solving big problems) then you have to look at three critical issues:

1) Time to Market: How long will it take to get the idea from concept to completion to channel to the end user?

2) Time to Money: From the time the idea is clarified, how long will it be until we can generate revenue from it?

3) What resources do we have on hand to pursue the problem/project?

If you look at how these overlay, then you'll find that they often contrast dramatically at the edges, but the goal(s) (solve a problem, create revenue, add value) are at the center of the issue.

We use a spreadhseet we've developed in-house called The Decision Matrix to evaluate our needs/goals and creative products.

By putting the idea in one side and then "rating" it based on how much it can impact the company, what direction it takes us in, how passionate we are about it, how it rates with other opportunities, how much support we can get from the channel, friends, the family, etc... and what's required to get it from a concept to cashflow, we arrive at a rating, from 10-100.

With it, we've developed much bigger projects, because every idea you put in is compared to every other project (we do limit it to 12 simultaneous ideas).

Because generating $$ is one of the more critical areas of a business, we find the less we have to expend in $$ to get the product or service out the door, and the faster the channel adopts it, the faster we get returns.

So LESS is almost always MORE, at least in the SMB marketplace (if nothing else the overzealous, overfunded dot-bomb casualties taught us something about that, save for a few real home runs like Amazon and Yahoo, companies with REAL revenue models you could scale). We call the other way working with "Unobtanium": that unlimited financial constraint stuff that doesn't care if you get a product, you're just having fun playing. Sure, you MAY get a product or solution in the end, but likely it will appeal mostly to those who breathe very thin air.

Thanks for the compelling topic, Heath.

Best of success,
Mark Alan Effinger
PRWeb.com

Luck suppported,everything will become a great good idea and leading, off course.Lot of leading ideas die at the nascent stage.Social,family constraints ,financial constraints force one's creativity to die early.This is the normal trend.Any deviation from normal makes one special,and if he gets a conducive environment then watch out.He is the person.And they are very few.

A 'smart' management guru (the kinds drucker warns the world against) can write for either sides of the case. what? gladwell and friedman are circling over us right now. with publishers you say...i see....

Do constraints catalyze creativity?

no.case in point : ramanujam,Dell,Google,ebay and hotmail in the incubation phase. small, underfunded and hungry. kicked everyone's sorry a**.

yes. this is an ode to those billions of ideas that must have died at the garage table itself because the inventors faced constraints. financial, geographic and lord knows what else. HP is the exception NOT the rule.

what?...friendman ahs patented the word. i am outta here.

Constraints do indeed catalyze creativity.