This sounds similar to the "Hack Day" conceived over at Yahoo!. We shamelessly stole the idea here at AG: once a year every single developer & business analyst takes 24 hours to gather into loosely planned teams with even more loosely planned ideas and see what kind of cool stuff we can build. Prizes are awarded for Overall Best Hack, Funniest Hack, Best Internal Hack, Most Likely to Go Over Budget, etc., and in fact, several projects who saw their inception as throwaway Hack Day ideas have charmed the company brass and become fully-implemented, revenue-generating projects in their own right. Very exciting!
