Many of us never get the chance to take a sabbatical. But no matter the career field if part of a job requirement is the creation of new ideas some lengthy time away could lead to breakthroughs. For example, apparently since the 1930s 3M has been giving generous personal time for their engineers and, as such, both Scotch Tape and the Post-It were conceived during time away from work.
Stefan Sagmeister gave a fantastic presentation at TED on this subject... Every seven years he closes down his NY design studio for one year and takes a sabbatical. After watching the video an interesting thing to ponder is that by structuring a sabbatical in the correct way the output that results upon return could be more valuable than the output would have been had the sabbatical never happened.
(Found on PSFK)