Abstract

This paper considers the relationship between organisational slack and innovation from a new perspective. Moving away from the traditional quantitative research approaches, semi-structured interviews and an activity theory framework are used to operationalize a qualitative view of how slack affects the innovation process. This reveals various kinds of formal and informal slack which are considered important by people involved with innovation in a variety of different organisations. In contrast with existing literature’s emphasis on money as the purest form of slack, the data presented here suggest that time and other kinds of informal slack have important roles to play in the innovation process.