Research on organizational ingenuity highlights different constraints on and ingenuity strategies adopted by organizations. Although creative industries must overcome various constraints to enhance their creativity, scant research examines creative industries from an ingenuity perspective. The current article offers a case study in the perfume industry to analyze the different types of constraints that affect the creative process. Specifically, this study discusses the ingenuity strategies an entrepreneur can adopt to cope with a strongly constrained context, to create different and “more creative” perfumes. This strategy, or creative symbiosis, provides new insights into extant research on ingenuity.
