It's been tried in a lot of different settings, generally with very mixed results in my experience.

I started my career at Acxiom (think data warehousing/personal information data mining/etc...). Each division in Acxiom was split up into business units that all operated fairly autonomously. If you wanted to use company resources outside of your unit, you had to pay for them in real dollars from your business unit.

It led to all sorts of really bizarre product development. The particular product I was working on was one of three (that I knew of) within the company all doing almost exactly the same thing with very minor differences between them. One customer would ask for the tool and far to often business units would just start building it themselves.

Really the issue seemed to be that the failure rate for these business units was pretty close to startup failure rates. Which is simply intolerable for most companies. Your business shouldn't essentially be a big VC firm fronting a lot of small internal 'startups'.

I've run across several other examples at various levels of scale. Microsoft, in some ways, is organized along the same lines for one instance.