In 1942, the design couple Charles and Ray Eames received a rather strange request: It was World War II and the U.S. government was facing significant challenges in treating battlefield injuries. Traditional metal splints were proving inadequate. They were heavy, didn’t conform to the body, and could exacerbate injuries when wounded soldiers were transported. At the time, the Eameses had begun experimenting with molded plywood to create sculptural objects. Their sculptures caught the attention of the government, who saw the potential of plywood for medical applications.

The Eameses were awarded a contract to produce plywood splints for the military, which sparked a period of intense experimentation. The couple realized that if plywood could be molded to fit people’s legs, it could also be molded to fit people’s backsides — hence, furniture.

Suddenly, their workshop resembled a laboratory, where they tested various techniques to bend and mold plywood into different shapes and different chair configurations. They produced countless prototypes and failures and in testing each combination of elements, they began to narrow in on promising directions.

Ultimately, their exploration paid off. The molded-plywood furniture designs that emerged from this period became instant classics. And not only have the Eames chair designs been hugely influential, but their investigations paved the way for using plywood to make furniture, which is now a standard in the industry.

Conventional wisdom about creativity tells us that freedom is your friend. A quote often misattributed to essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Funk musician George Clinton put it a bit more succinctly, “Free your mind and your ass will follow.” And, at some point, we’ve all heard, “think outside the box.”

But is it true in practice? Do people come up with better ideas when they have fewer rules or constraints?

In fact, research by the University of British Columbia’s Page Moreau and Darren Dahl reveals the opposite: People generate better ideas when they're given more constraints, not fewer.

In their studies, Moreau and Dahl asked college students to design children’s toys. While this might sound like a dream assignment, there was a clever twist. The researchers gave participants a set of basic shapes to work with — things like handles, spheres and pyramids. Some students were given complete freedom: They could use any shapes they wanted or none at all. Others faced increasingly strict rules, with the most constrained group having to incorporate exactly five specific shapes chosen by the researchers.

Once they finished, the designs were given to a panel of experts with significant experience in the toy industry. The experts rated each toy based on its market potential.

Whose toys do you think were rated most likely to succeed? According to the think-outside-the-box logic, the group with the most freedom should come up with the best toy designs. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the participants who received the most constraints came up with the best toy designs. When participants were given five randomly selected shapes and were told they had to use all of them, the resulting toy designs were, on average, rated as significantly more likely to succeed than the toys generated in the other conditions.

To figure out what explained this result, Moreau and Dahl examined the written logs that participants kept while they were coming up with their designs. And what they found was that the constraints led participants to approach the problem in a completely different way. Rather than defaulting to common toy ideas, participants began their ideation by thinking about the constraints: “Hmm… let’s see. I have to use a cylinder, a pyramid, a handle, a cross and a thin pole. What kind of a thing could I create that would use all five shapes?” Approaching the problem in this way led to toy designs that were rated as significantly more successful and innovative.

Conceptual constraints like those used in the toy design study are not the only types of constraints that boost creativity. For example, research shows that in some situations, groups with smaller budgets come up with more creative (and better) solutions than groups with larger budgets. For example, when Steven Spielberg made Jaws, the production quickly went over the modest studio budget of $4 million. Spielberg had initially planned to heavily feature a mechanical shark nicknamed, "Bruce." But after several malfunctions with three different prototypes, he abandoned the idea . This forced Spielberg to leave much to the audience's imagination, which in the end, made those scenes with just the shark fin, much more terrifying.

There is a joke that the limited budget was also responsible for composer John Williams’s now-classic Jaws theme consisting of only two notes, bah-dum, bah-dum.

And consider the career of artist Henri Matisse. Matisse was a painter, but at the age of 71, he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. To save his life, the doctors performed a dramatic operation that involved removing a significant portion of his intestines. Unable to stand at an easel, Matisse began experimenting with an entirely new medium using paper cut-outs — those cut-outs became some of Matisse’s most influential and recognizable works. For example, Matisse considered “Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence,” to be his artistic masterpiece. Using only the paper cutouts, Matisse designed the entire interior of a chapel including stained glass windows, murals, wall hangings, and vestments.

Constraints are an increasing reality for many organizations today whether because of budget cuts, downsizing, or changes in the broader market. But it is important to remember that as far as creativity is concerned, constraints are not the enemy of creativity — they are the engine. When you take the time to identify the constraints of your creative challenge, you’re creating a framework that guides your search toward new solutions and outcomes that you might not have considered otherwise.

Think inside the box. Whether it’s product design, writing, or artistic pursuits, the principle holds: the more clearly you define your constraints — the walls of your box — the more likely you are to uncover something great.

Putting constraints into practice: Start with a project or idea. This could be anything ranging from a project for school or work, to a new business venture, to a reexamination of an existing product line. List all the constraints you can think of (e.g., budget, time, materials, technology). Imagine your project as a box. What are the walls of the box? What defines it and gives it shape? For each constraint think of ways to turn this limitation into an advantage or opportunity. This could involve using the constraint to simplify the project or serve a different need. Also imagine someone who represents the group of people you are targeting. Think about their interests, motivations, and what they seek to gain from engaging with your idea. Would any of these constraints-turned-opportunities particularly benefit them? If you can, collect feedback or data to prioritize which constraints show the most promising areas for development.

This an adapted excerpt from George Newman’s forthcoming book, How Great Ideas Happen, which will be published by Simon & Schuster in January 2026. Want more research on creativity? Subscribe to the Rotman Insights Hub to get the latest management research delivered straight to your inbox every other week.