I feel like this does exist already in a lot of places, we just call it different things. 20% time is a great analogy in my mind. Allowing employees to work on new ideas, but with some minor direction seems to be the nuance.
"I want to break into this new market and I need something that satisfies constraints X, Y and Z. You have a fat budget and as many Fridays as you need to come up with a concept/prototype."
Once a concept is clearly valuable, additional time and resources should be immediately allocated. You could just say to the person who proposed it "this is your full time job as of next Monday, how many people do you need?"
The more aggressively you pursue new ideas the faster you will find the really good ones. You can't be afraid to call out shitty ideas either. Just make it clear that no one will ever lose their job over a bad idea invented in good faith.
What I describe here is basically how our company operates today. Having the flexibility to try scary new things in a supportive environment had yielded some incredible intellectual property over the years. Our customers still can't figure out how we are able to ship to production multiple times per day with a 7 person team while our 10,000+ employee vendors require 3 weeks for basic reconfiguration tasks and entire fiscal quarters for actual software releases.
"I want to break into this new market and I need something that satisfies constraints X, Y and Z. You have a fat budget and as many Fridays as you need to come up with a concept/prototype."
Once a concept is clearly valuable, additional time and resources should be immediately allocated. You could just say to the person who proposed it "this is your full time job as of next Monday, how many people do you need?"
The more aggressively you pursue new ideas the faster you will find the really good ones. You can't be afraid to call out shitty ideas either. Just make it clear that no one will ever lose their job over a bad idea invented in good faith.
What I describe here is basically how our company operates today. Having the flexibility to try scary new things in a supportive environment had yielded some incredible intellectual property over the years. Our customers still can't figure out how we are able to ship to production multiple times per day with a 7 person team while our 10,000+ employee vendors require 3 weeks for basic reconfiguration tasks and entire fiscal quarters for actual software releases.