I thought about something similar, but more like a "monastery-style research institute" where people, with some amount of provable expertise, regardless of credentials or previous publications, would be able to check-in for pre-determined period of time and just do "open ended research" (the kind of things no sane university or corporation would ever pay for...) and have living expenses plus other basic needs provided, and spared from having to waste energy in the meaningless and draining "dance" we call "social life", for with the sole condition that their research is "open source" and that they are actually staying there working, not just using it as a free/cheap rent.

The "monastery" could also be run as a business, having a for-profit section developing products based on the ideas produced inside. Something like the members of the monastery signing an agreement that they are ok with their results being published with one year delay, time that would give an edge to the monastery over any competitors that would also want to develop products based on them - think of it like a "research monastery self-financed by coupling with a sort of startup incubator" (with some really intransigent and incorruptible people working to keep the two camps of people apart and to stop the "business idea developers" from exploiting the "monks").

And for research fields that require some expensive equipment, like bio-medical research, the "monastery" may make the "monks" sign contracts giving the patents and other right to their discoveries to the monastery, in exchange for having access to a lab where they can work on anything they want. It's not that utopic since you can a pretty usable top notch molecular biology lab plus an animal experiments facility for under $1M (probably not in the US because you have too many regulations and stuff...) if you find alternative channels of buying equipment of user other "hacks" that regular research institutes can't use...

But it's the kind of idea that it's hard to convince other people it would make sense... so for now I'll keep it on my list of to-dos for after I get filthy rich so I can finance this myself.