Great article. I always try, sometimes with a little success, to apply ideas I read about to my own life. I am a one man consulting shop but I try to integrate experiments/research into my weekly work flow because that was what I was used to as an employee (about a day a week of IR&D at SAIC, lots of experiments were done at Angel Studios for work for Nintendo and Disney, etc.)

Compared to companies like Facebook and Google, where I often go wrong is not more tightly coupling experiments/side projects to what my customers need. Instead, I invest my 1/3 time for experiments more on things that just really interest me and very often I don't really apply what I learn to practical projects.

My Dad is a scientist (at 91 he is still a member of the National Academy of Sciences) and over breakfast today I was describing to him the really fast iterative business/research/deployment cycles at Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Very different time scale than what he was used to.