Beyond thinking up a great new idea, innovation also requires what’s called “slack” time—a chance to work out the details.
“Slack time does something more than what we thought,” says Avi Goldfarb, 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 mundane, execution-oriented tasks.”
Goldfarb and colleagues from the Rotman School and the MIT Sloan School of Management examined data from the crowdfunding site Kickstarter over a five-year period to track the ebb and flow of new projects going online for donations during and outside US college breaks.
They found a 49 percent increase in projects posted in college towns during vacation times. There were also correlations between the types of projects and the types of schools: more artistic projects were posted when arts schools went on breaks, while more tech projects got posted during breaks for top engineering schools.
