Slack Time and Innovation Harvard Business （松弛时间和哈佛商业创新）.pdfVIP

Slack Time and Innovation Ajay Agrawal Christian Catalini Avi Goldfarb Hong Luo Working Paper 16-106 Slack Time and Innovation Ajay Agrawal Christian Catalini University of Toronto Massachusetts Institute of Technology Avi Goldfarb Hong Luo University of Toronto Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-106 Copyright © 2016 by Ajay Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb, and Hong Luo Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Slack Time and Innovation Ajay Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb, Hong Luo⇤ March 30, 2016 Abstract Traditional innovation models assume that new ideas are developed up to the point where the benefit of the marginal project is just equal to the cost. Because labor is a key input to innovation, when the opportunity cost of time is lower, such as during school breaks or time o↵ from work, then such models predict that the number of ideas developed will be greater, but the average quality will be lower due to the lower expected value of marginal ideas. However, we posit that slack time such as school breaks may be qualitatively di↵erent than work time because contiguous blocks may be particularly beneficial for working on complex projects. We present a model incorporating this idea that predicts th