Organizational Creative Capabilities

4Creative Slack Enabling Ideas to Emerge, to be Stored and Transform

In recent years, the notion of creative slack has emerged in innovation management literature to describe the stock of material and immaterial resources that can be mobilized for organizational creative capabilities (Cohendet and Simon 2007, 2016; Harvey et al. 2013; Parmentier et al. 2017). According to these authors, the formation of creative slack is one of the central components explaining organizational creative capabilities, as it enables individuals, teams, and communities within the organization to tap into previously untapped or underutilized resources in order to guide or redirect the company’s projects with creative ideas.

Cohendet and Simon (2007) illustrate, for example, how in the field of video games, Ubisoft consistently excels in innovation by incorporating unused or underused creative ideas developed by different teams and communities within the organization as part of their daily work. Others, like 3M, have a policy that encourages employees to explore new ideas, as exemplified by this quote from one of the company’s employees (Garud et al. 2011):

I’ll now make a confession: the 15% parts of the 15% rule is essentially meaningless. Some of our technical people use much more than 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing. Some use less than that; some use none at all… The number is not so important as the message, which is this: the system has some slack in it. If you have a good ...