Corporate Innovation Programs: A Way to Organize Creative Time in Companies

It is widely regarded that employees are an important source of creativity. Hence, many companies offer specific programs to foster creative outputs. For this, employees are granted time to work on creative ideas, beyond Research and Development departments, called corporate innovation programs. How does one organize this time? Our research indicates that schedule autonomy is very important and that it has a high impact on creative results. Innovation programs can be implemented by a spontaneous time model with free time allocation, or by a predetermined version with fixed timeslots. We discuss the advantages of both models, as well as the implications of how to implement this in a company context.