The webcast of Eric Schmidt [1] the chief executive officer of Google actually goes to the technical audience and has a bit of the usual Google employing PR as usual...

• People are allowed to spend 20% of their work time to build their own ideas and projects
• this time is NOT managed, but tracked over the whole company
• the innovation rate of Google is bigger than of any other competitor in the industry - because of this (and the nice workplace, team play, fun at work etc...)

published [2]

Nice to have confirmed again that the top performing teams are the teams of small size(3-5 people), the project durations of a few weeks or months and it all comes down to the inital ideas and project work practice in XP, Agile projects or simply iterative project models...

Google is a nice case study and public real-life example for that model to work.

This is the "peopleware" book I refered to above...