I've seen some cool hackathons run internally at some companies I've worked for. It was during work hours (paid) and managers set time aside for people who want

I've seen some cool hackathons run internally at some companies I've worked for. It was during work hours (paid) and managers set time aside for people who wanted to participate. Often it was something like, "we have all this data, what could we use it for?" and teams would often come up with some pretty cool projects based on the data. At the end there was a big presentation that anyone in the company could attend and each team would present what they came up with. Some of them eventually became products directly, or at least set the groundwork for future products. So in a sense it was basically just "work", but it was driven by the individual contributors and not a top-down directive.