[heathlilley]

I remember talking to a previous boss saying, "I've been thinking of starting skunk works project 'X'. Where 'X' was introducing an ORM, JQuery, or cleaning up some old code/modules. And the answer was always "I'd rather you work on the backlog [of features]."

IMHO, he line of thinking where employers want you only grinding on today's problems rather than additionally incrementally honing the skills to innovate is a broken methodology and does not work for software. The barrier to learning these skills is too low to expect people not to want to do these things and it keeps getting lower.