The innovative power of slack time

There is a whole lot more to innovation than thinking up a great new idea. A new study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management suggests that when budding entrepreneurs get time off their normal activities to work on other things - dubbed 'slack' time - they use it to complete the less exciting jobs needed to bring a novel project to life.

That could shed more light on the value of giving potential innovators downtime, such as Google's famous perk of allowing employees to spend 20 per cent of their hours on interesting side projects.

"Slack time does something more than what we thought," said researcher Avi Goldfarb, the Patricia Ellison Professor of marketing at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "You need a creative idea for sure, but you also need to tell people about it and you need to put some effort into raising money. Slack time may give you the opportunity to do those execution-oriented tasks." The research, which examined data from the crowdfunding site Kickstarter over a five-year period to track the flow of new projects going online for donations during US college breaks, found a 49 per cent increase in projects posted during vacation times.