Whilst I generally agree with your view on innovation and the whole "special friends club". But 20% time wouldn't counter the innovator's dilemma: there will st

Whilst I generally agree with your view on innovation and the whole "special friends club". But 20% time wouldn't counter the innovator's dilemma: there will still be established power structures in place, reaching to the top levels of the business, who have a vested interest in their status quo (and that doesn't mean no innovation - they can still be innovating), who will fight disruptive innovation. Google seems particularly rife with this! The value in a incubator, new product development group, or "spin out", (don't think any CoE I've seen fits this model...), is that they have top level sponsorship to go outside of normal process for: hiring, sales, tools, platforms, etc. as required, and just build new stuff. If that's disruptive in the short term, C-levels should be pushing it through for long term gains. You also place a lot of trust in engineers to have Clue about what to work on. Most will have ideas, many of those ideas would be a very poor use of the companies resources. If those guys feel strongly, they should spin out, and pitch to their old senior execs for seed funding. They'll soon find out if their idea has legs...