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If You Cut Employees Some Slack, Will They Innovate?
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If You Cut Employees Some Slack, Will They Innovate?

Yasser Rahrovani, Alain Pinsonneault and Robert D. Austin
MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018
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  • Innovative
  • Applicable
  • Well Structured

Recommendation

Innovative companies such as 3M and Google allow their employees to set aside 15-20% of their work hours to fiddle with their own ideas. Yet other companies have found that slack time and a well-equipped workspace won’t automatically translate into more innovation. In their article for MIT Sloan Management Review, researchers Yasser Rahrovani, Alain Pinsonneault and Robert D. Austin explain why. 

Take-Aways

  • Companies often use “slack resources” – in the form of time, technology and support – to encourage employees to innovate.
  • An employee’s innovation potential, however, depends on two variables: level of expertise and self-professed innovativeness.
  • To motivate employees to innovate, managers must tailor slack resources to employees’ varying degrees of expertise and innovativeness. 

About the Authors

Yasser Rahrovani and Robert D. Austin are professors of information systems at Ivey Business School in Canada. Alain Pinsonneault is an information systems professor at McGill University, Canada.

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