With an influx of highly educated migrants comes an increase in cultural breadth, ideas, and perspectives in organizations, which in turn is linked to a variety of positive effects and outcomes, such as innovation. In this paper, we study highly educated migrant innovativeness. Building on the idea that migrants’ experiences prior to migration, specifically their exposure to hardships and lack of opportunities (what we refer to as “developmental deprivation”) may be a driving force behind generating novel and useful ideas in their destination countries. We draw on self-determination theory and decision-making inclusion literature to develop our hypotheses, which are supported in a study of highly educated migrants from 45 countries working in the private and public sectors of Sweden. First and foremost, there is a significant relationship between high levels of developmental deprivation and high levels of innovativeness in the destination country. In addition, to be included in decision-making is critical for high innovativeness among those migrants who have not experienced developmental deprivation to any larger degree. However, for those who have experienced developmental deprivation in their origin country, their innovativeness is higher at low levels of decision-making inclusion. Contributions, limitations and future research are discussed before concluding the paper.