Picking up a technology magazine recently, I noticed a conspicuously large lump in the middle of the magazine and dutifully flipped to the section to see what kind of annoying advertisement was distorting the normally nice flat shape to which I was accustomed. I was surprised to find a neat little pullout booklet from BMW. The theme was two powerful little letters - NO.

Hmm, what is this? Was this some kind of marketing campaign by the Blue Meanies who famously wouldn't take YES for an answer? Not quite. BMW was making the point that by defining what you won't do, it allows you to effectively communicate what you can do. It's an excellent point, and a brilliant marketing campaign.

Whether you make automobiles, semiconductors, or IP it is useful to know where your limits are. It's even more useful to tell your customers where those limits are. Limits are useful and in fact, serve as boundaries for which our true creativity can flourish. We have laws and regulation that tell us what's considered fair and in play. In electronics, we have standards that help us define how things are supposed to work together.

In a nutshell, NO demarcates the negative space in such a way that the positive space becomes apparent.

NO also seems to have some cultural manifestations. Several Frenchmen have kindly explained to me that what some Americans may mistake as European pessimism is really nothing more than trying to quickly dispense of trivial optimism (YES) and getting to the hard questions as soon as possible.

In other words, they seek out the NO. Contrast this with Japan, where NO is a rather rude word. And YES has the meaning of "I understand" rather then the western "I agree". Surely this is a challenge for all of us in our increasingly global economy.

Its probable that creativity actually increases when faced with constraints. Engineers are often labelled as non-creative types - but give them the constraints of a problem to solve and, voila, the juices get flowing and get ready for a patent application.

I recently read an article that described some work by child behaviour scientists studying creative play in children. Children were placed in a plain rectangular play yard with some balls and sports equipment. They were quickly bored, most not knowing what to do. On the next day the same children were moved from the rectangular yard to one with an irregular border and the sports equipment taken away. Quickly the children improvised games that took advantage of idiosyncratic constraints of their new environment. Simply put, very few people have the creative capacity to deal with a blank sheet of paper.

Customers are no exception. If, as a supplier of technology, you cannot clearly articulate the negative space of your products don't expect the customer to be creative about its application.

As a developer of technology, an essential job of a product manager is to define the positive and negative space. Imagine how much clearer it is to a design engineer if the manager can state our product will do this AND will not do that.

The grey between the positive and negative spaces is likely where true product differentiation will be seen. And just as BMW has done, let the marketers make the most of the difference.

So, as Nancy Reagan used to say, "Just say No." It could be your liberation.

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Warren Savage, President and CEO of IPextreme, is a well-known and published authority in the field of semiconductor intellectual property. He has a long history of pushing the envelope of design methodology from his work in fault tolerant computing at Tandem Computers in the 1980's and driving reliable design methodologies into commercial practice at Synopsys for its DesignWare IP product in the 1990s.

Much of his thinking became embodied in the seminal book on IP reuse, the Reuse Methodology Manual. Warren is taking his vision to the next level with his latest company, IPextreme, which is focused on enabling broad commercialisation of IP captive in large semiconductor companies.