"Agile" labs environment

I was asked by our management to lead the innovative software research of new technologies at our organization. I'm all for it. But personally I think what would be the first step in this undertaking is to have a little bit of freedom for our engineering team. By that I mean it would be great if our management supported and approved to have a some sort of a "labs" environment, consisting of a say Linux box with full root given to the engineering team, so the full freedom of experimentation could be achieved without the usual hurdles and roadblocks of a day-to-day operational and engineering teams interaction.

If that somehow happens, I would have a hope :-)

Later...