Deprivation is the mother of innovation

Necessity is the mother of invention. How many times have we heard that?

But time and again, Apple releases products which are initially unnecessary, but eventually become indispensable.

Over the past few months, I watched as Apple released a highly limited product called the iPad, much like the very limited iPhone and the iPod when those products were first released. As always, the skeptics, myself included focused on the limitations. But over time, something else happened. The products became useful.

The users of the iPad for example, began to devise their own solutions to the limitations. The first was the iPad printing solution: photocopy the entire iPad. Obviously it was a joke, but certainly, it was a different solution to a problem. While everyone was thinking of printing to a cloud, USB transfer, or emailing, someone thought about things in a different way. Then of course came other solutions: camera card reader kits, iPad stands, etc.

Apple is well known, not for inventing, but innovating based on existing technology and implementing it in a more user-friendly way. Steve Jobs is the master of picking the right technologies to use; thinking about things differently. However, without existing and new cutting edge technology to feed on, Apple would never be able to innovate. If things remained stagnant, like their closed ecosystem, how would new features come into being?

Apple's solution: Deprivation.

Just like how they omitted arrow keys on the Mac, the floppy on the iMac, the physical keyboard on the iPhone, and the USB on the iPad, I suspect that Apple intentionally cripples their products to stimulate new ways of looking at old problems. By re-framing the problem, new innovative solutions emerge, which Apple would eventually natively support.

Apple is indulging in creative destruction. It wipes the slate clean and forces new perspectives by routinely killing old solutions which once worked, but now, as Steve Jobs would say, "suck."

In my freshman year of college, my math professor told me, as part of a job application, he was required to learn an entire book on aeronautic engineering in a week, pass a test on it, and then he was told to come up with a solution which did not use any of the concepts he was required to learn.

Perhaps that is the real step forward for our world. What if in an effort to solve other problems, we simply deprived ourselves of some peripheral tools? In trying to solve our traffic problems, we said, "No new roads will be built." Could we think differently then? In trying to solve our security problems, we said, "No additional troops."

Maybe to truly unleash our potential, we must deprive ourselves, step out of the comfort zone, so that we are forced to innovate.