It kind of worked like you're describing except that there was very little actual money. In some cases we'd get $10K but most of the time the support was in the

It kind of worked like you're describing except that there was very little actual money. In some cases we'd get $10K but most of the time the support was in the form of a tacit agreement to let us work maybe 4-8 hrs/week on a side project and use resources we already had from our day jobs. Once the project was accepted into the funnel, based on a prototype of some sort, you had to come up with a business plan and present the whole thing to a board. The problem was that at our site there were very few actual business people with spare bandwidth so the plans written up by engineers were met with scepticism. This is probably not unlike what actual startups run into, even after the lessons from the dot-com bust: there's a lot of enthusiasm around the technical ideas but it's hard to convince investors.