Maybe this is the small-scale return of private research units like Bell Labs or (Xerox) PARC (although both of them still exist, they are not as significant as they once were) for the Web: put a group of awesome guys together and just let them cook a bit and see what's coming out ...
It's more like the classic definition of skunkworks than "official" research. A good example is NuCalc, which continued to be developed after the project was cancelled by Apple.
