I've decided that the novelty thing I have been posting about is a fragment of org design.
And it is a type of org design that looks at how formal structures can promote certain behaviour. I'm focusing on novelty, but you could do the same for empathy.
I think one of the the dominant mode of org design is the "get good people", which gets you novelty seeking, empathy and other good stuff. I'm not sure it scales to the size of google or on longer time frames.
Any way this is a meandering post that claims org design for this kinda thing