Natural innovation within an organization depends entirely on rewards and it's been my experience that having multiple different innovation 'programs' with different life-cycles is a good way to foster an innovation culture. Having multiple different programs also right-sizes the opportunities for different ideas. At the very least it gets people talking to each other which in my experience has always been a prerequisite for innovation.

The downside of innovation programs is that they may be just an ineffective attempt to patch over the strict control policies that idiot managers put into place in order to protect the organization from its problem employees.

I wouldn't be surprised if a company sent it's managers on mandatory vacation for 4 weeks every other month and saw an increase in morale, worker productivity, and meaningful innovation.