via Award Your Own Genius Grants – Julia Kirby – Our Editors – Harvard Business Review.

Love this idea. Especially creative departments and industries that really require innovation and forward thinking….need to incorporate time for their employees to be infused and ignited. They produce better ideas and can feel free to innovate.  So many companies now a days just shove work down people’s throats, overwork them, dictate direction

The value of giving people that kind of slack to dream up and explore new ideas is a common theme in the literature on innovation management. In an oft-cited meta-analysis by Fariborz Damanpour, for example, it was determined to be a key driver of organizational innovation. Teresa Amabile proved the case in the negative, demonstrating that time pressure is the enemy of creativity.Granting slack time is also common practice in some of the world’s most inventive firms. The progenitor of the approach was 3M, with its famous release time for engineers to pursue pet projects. Today, Google is the poster child, with its “20 percent time” projects. My friend Uri Neren, who has compiled a database of innovation management practices, declares such “unofficial activity” to be one of the most prevalent conditions in businesses that excel at creativity.