Why name the company?
Especially that one. I'll bet they know, by now (maybe they already did, and don't care. Google is famous for leveraging their -and our- data).
I've found that many corporations are willing to settle for fairly mediocre work, as long as the processes are followed, and the cheese not moved. Having especially brilliant folks in place, means that if there is a problem, they have the bandwidth to deal with it. If I were your manager, I'd probably be pretty happy to have you there, but I'd also be worried that you weren't being challenged, and see if there was something I could do to challenge you, while improving my department's lot (I would probably do some kind of "20%" project).
TBH: Most work is fairly rote. R&D departments are usually pretty small. Production is about a predictable, low-variance workflow.
What I did, was work on some open-source stuff. Some of it has turned out to be quite impactful.
But I was fortunate. I had an employment contract that didn't have the "shower clause" (where they lay claim to the ideas that you come up with in the shower).
I strongly suspect that your contract has a "shower clause."
And many European countries eg Germany just have it as part of the general labor law - so you wouldn't see it in a "contract"
This explains why Germans always seemed so surprised when I mentioned my extracurricular work to them.
Must make moonlighting difficult.
Also, I’m almost positive that the reason my company did not have the clause, was because they hired many high-level creative folks, with lifelong side businesses.
It was a photographic equipment company, and we had some really good photographers all over the place.
One of our lens techs was a well-respected avian photographer, and our Marketing department was filled with top-notch photographers.
You couldn't spit without hitting a first-class artist. Even the administrators and accountants tended to be pretty awesome casual photographers.
If you're at Google you're already clearly gifted and one of the leading people in your industry, and if you're cruising there then you're probably still doing absolutely stellar work.
You may not recognize it, but this is a statistical distribution argument. :) It is assuming that there is a steep gradient between Google and "outside-of-google".
It is hard to prove that this is true regardless of the intentions of the statement or what was left unsaid.