Children are often taught that the opposite of play is work. But forStuart Brown, psychiatrist and clinical researcher, the opposite of play is something closer to boredom, or even depression. Brown began considering the importance of play decades ago while studying murderers and felony drunk drivers, noticing its absence throughout their lives. Later he found that highly creative people consider play an essential ingredient of success and well-being.

As recently as 15 years ago, few in the corporate world were willing to entertain the idea that play could be profitable. But in an age when technology is destabilising and reconfiguring entire industries, the half-life of business models is short, and younger workers change jobs frequently, managers are looking for any way to innovate and retain talent.

“The science indicates that, when playfulness is a part of the ethic of an organisation, whether it’s a family or General Motors, it increases efficiency, competitiveness and productivity, and lessens attrition,” Brown says. “It works. It’s a slow cultural shift that is occurring in some places more than others.”

The corporate sector has been on the slow side of this trend.Managers committed to delivering efficiently on established business models worry about rocking the boat. But a new solution is emerging as a compromise between the anything-goes start-up mentality and the day-to-day numbers grind: the internal innovation lab.

Companies have been creating separate departments with different rules for innovation since the 1940s, when aerospace company Lockheed established a secret incubator in a circus tent next to a plastics factory in Burbank, California. The result, the P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter, went on to see extensive service in Korea –and the experiment also added a word to the vocabulary of innovation. The fumes from the plastics gave rise to the nickname Skunk Works, a term now adopted to refer to outside-the-box innovation groups in general, such as the Google X lab and the early division of Apple that developed the Macintosh computer.

Managers often pay lip service to the idea of play and innovation, perhaps buying a football table that ends up gathering dust as workers race to hit deadlines. But play is at the heart of the new innovation labs. Innovation researcher Bruce Nussbaum compares them to the idea of the “magic circle”, a space described by Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga in his influential 1938 work Homo Ludens. “All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally,” Huizinga writes. “The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage ... All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”