What Inspires Leisure Time Invention?

This paper seeks to understand the intriguing but only sparsely explored phenomenon of “leisure timeinvention,” where the main underlying idea for the new product or process occurs when the inventor isaway from the workplace. We add to previous research by focussing on the inventive creativity of theindividual researcher, and reassessing the image of researchers inventing during unpaid time – whohave often been dispatched as “hobbyists”. Based on the responses from a survey of over 3,000German inventors, we tested hypotheses on the conditions under which leisure time invention is likelyto arise. Results suggest that the incidence of leisure time invention is positively related to exposure toa variety of knowledge inputs – but, surprisingly, not to the quality of prior inventive output. Leisuretime inventions are more frequently observed in conceptual-based technologies than in science-basedtechnologies, in smaller R&D projects, and in externally financed R&D projects....