If you’re a hands-on engineer or hobbyist, chances are, like me, you spend a decent amount of your free time watching manufacturing processes and other videos of people building all sorts of things. I recently watched some videos of manufacturing processes in developing nations, mostly from Eastern Asia. From manufacturing the Tuktuk tricycles, to a process of making vehicle horns, to making a water heater out of a steel drum. Through all these examples, one thing that stood out to me was the level of resourcefulness applied in their processes. Being resourceful in industrial settings has always been highly amplified by scarcity, or necessity. Synthetic rubber for example, was developed during World War II due to scarcity, as well as the development of nylon, due to trade disruptions of silk, which was a key component for manufacturing parachutes. In the current age of AI and other tools, it should be a strategic priority and necessity for organizations to assess their efficiency when it comes to use of resources, in order to stay competitive.
It is certain that this sense of resourcefulness seen in underdeveloped nations is not taught in any formal institution, or anywhere else for that matter, but rather inherently gained due to scarcity in nature. While watching such manufacturing processes, as an Engineer who has been exposed to very resource abundant engineering environments, I am always analyzing the process being used to produce the products. I would wonder how I would handle certain steps, what tool I would likely use to be more efficient, how I would automate those older mechanical tools, or what safety mechanisms I would add to the process. I would also wonder whether the builders themselves are aware of these potential process improvements.
With the amount of skills they have, and how long they must have been in these specific jobs or trades, it’s very likely that they are aware of how the same products are produced in developed countries or larger advanced companies. They however still apply their own processes, not because it is the best in the world, but because it is what they are able to do with the resources they have. This creates a sense of creativity that is naturally harder to achieve when you have a large budget and no sense of limitations to accomplish the same task. That creativity in return, allows these builders to sometimes build at a much lower cost, both for production and development, than that of the same product in the United States for example. They are also able to find issues quicker and make necessary adjustments before incurring major costs. I also witnessed this first hand while traveling throughout East Africa, where I noticed how tradesmen of different backgrounds went about accomplishing significant tasks with only a few basic tools.
While I was perceiving their processes as slow, unsafe, and usually outdated, and though most of these factors may be true in many of the cases, their processes often focused more on the final product, and less on how pretty the process itself was. From flattening an oil drum into flat sheets, to marking it for cutting, cutting the pieces, and rolling them to form a new water heater shell, all with basic hand tools, I wondered how much planning and capital investments it would take a larger western company to produce the same output. With the recent developments from Deepseek, a Chinese AI lab that has stunned bigger players such as Open AI by building AI models that meet or exceed the performance of the top models from Open AI, while restricted by trade limits of computer chips, it further demonstrates that scarcity breeds creativity. A 2015 study at the University of Illinois found that scarcity activates a constraint mindset, which leads individuals to think beyond traditional product functionalities and develop more novel uses of products.
So, can you cultivate a resourceful mindset while having access to an abundance of resources? The short answer is yes, as nothing is stopping you from applying the same principles as those who are facing scarcity. You can make an intentional decision to limit heavy reliance on your own resources, and find creative ways to complete tasks in a lightweight or more efficient manner. If you’re in a developing part of the world, embrace this mindset, rather than defaulting to feeling stuck or as though you don’t have the necessary resources to achieve your business goals. Look around and dig for other creative alternatives, explore and get inspired with some ideas from those who have been handling a similar task with limited resources, and you may be surprised by what’s possible with what you already have.