Motivation, an important concept in management theory, can be defined as: “the reasons why people do the things they do” (Zenisek, 2009 ). A company that effectively motivates its employees will often perform better than another. One motivation technique is innovation time: giving employees the freedom to work on their own projects as part of their normal workload. These projects are entirely autonomous and rely heavily on the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of employees. Innovation time is a beneficial policy for two reasons: it can facilitate the creation of new revenue streams and it illustrates the positive aspects of academically accepted motivation theories, particularly the Job Characteristics Model (JCM). . Google and 3M, two very successful companies, attribute much of their success to their use of this motivation technique. Allowing employees time to innovate and work on projects not directly assigned to them by management is an effective way to motivate staff in today's competitive economy. Before examining the benefits of innovation time, it is important to understand the fundamentals of the theory. At its core, the idea of ​​giving employees time to self-direct in pursuing creative projects involves supporting the personal interests and entrepreneurial spirit of the innovator (Dackert, Looke, and Martensson). The technique aims to reduce employee turnover and increase productivity. The idea of ​​innovation time is attributed to an incident at 3M. A 3M engineer was directly ordered by a manager to stop working on a personal project during work hours. The employee ignored his manager's request and therefore invented what would become one of the 3Ms...... middle of paper ......ction/06/feature/24/34/83/ index_printer.html • Girard, B. (2009). The Google method. United States of America: No Starch Press. • Google. (2009). Google Financial Reports. Retrieved October 21, 2009, from Google Investor Relations: http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html• Google. (2009). The life of an engineer at Google. Retrieved October 21, 2009 from Jobs at Google: http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=about.html&about=eng• Govindarajan, V. (2002). Case study: 3M Company. Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business. Dartmouth College.• Langton, N., Robbins, S.P., & Judge, T.A. (2010). Organizational behavior: concepts, controversies, applications (5th edition ed.). (K. Pruesse, ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ, United States of America: Pearson Prentice Hall. • Zenisek, T. (October 1, 2009). Conference 4 - Motivation and confidence. Ottawa, Ontario.