There's nothing more soul-crushing for an organization than a board of directors.
But to argue that the board of directors is what's soul crushing about an organization seems odd to me.
It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what happens when someone on another team has a great idea? Do we transfer that person to the Innovation Department to continue innovating? What would that mean for their team left behind, relieved explicitly of responsibility, and implicitly of capability, to innovate?
Maybe the whole company should be tasked with innovation, but innovators should be allowed 80% time to write CRUD apps if they so choose.
Exactly. At the end of the day, anybody in a company can be responsible for a valuable innovation. This is why something like "20% time" is such a good idea in the first place. It avoids the trap of assuming that you can actually accurately select the people who "should" be doing innovative stuff.
OTOH, having a dedicated Research department where people spend 100% of their time on research and cutting-edge stuff also seems like a good idea. An interesting approach might be to have both "20% time" AND "Google X" but with a policy that allows the Hoi Polloi folks a chance to rotate through the dedicated research group on occasion.