Innovation, Tangible and Intangible Resources: The ‘Space of Slacks Interaction’

This paper focuses on the interaction between tangible slack (excess of tangible resources) and intangible slack (excess of intangible resources), and aims to contribute to investigating the complex relationship between slack resources and the success/failure of innovation processes. Rooted in the managerial and organizational literature, this paper underlies the ambivalent role of slack resources in strategic management and analyzes the trade-off between tangible and intangible slack in two different industrial paradigms (mass production vs. lean production). Althoug managerial and organizational scholars have dedicated many contributions to slack resources, they have paid little attention to investigating the reciprocal interaction between heterogeneous slack resources: the model ‘space of slacks interaction’ constitutes an original tool to begin to shed light on this issue. The ‘space of slacks interaction’ aims to offer an interpretative model to understand the effect of heterogeneous slack interaction on innovation process success/failure.