Google is going to keep a few of Motorola's hardware makers after all. But they won't build the usual mobile fare.

On Wednesday, the web giant announced that it will sell Motorola Mobility, the phone maker it acquired in 2012, offloading the operation to Chinese electronics giant Lenovo. But as it turns out, Google is holding on to part of Motorola's operation: the Advanced Technology and Projects group, or ATAP, as The Verge reports. ATAP is the Motorola skunkworks operation headed by Regina Dugan, the former head of the Defense Department's mad science division.

It's yet another reason the deal makes good sense for Google. Yes, the web giant sold Moto to Lenovo for about $3 billion, after buying the operation in 2011 for about $13 billion. But it sold a piece of Moto for $2.35 billion back in 2012, and it retains much of the extremely valuable Motorola patent portfolio. And now we know it's hanging on to ATAP as well.

Google has rightly realized that it doesn't need to be in the business of building commodity phones. But it only makes sense that it would retain Dugan and crew, who work on the next generation of hardware. This dovetails with the company's other consumer hardware projects, Nest and Google Glass, which are also aimed at capturing the future. That's where Google is most comfortable.

ATAP was founded inside Motorola in 2012, following Dugan's departure from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the Department of Defense. She left DARPA amidst an investigation into contracts the agency granted to a company she co-owned, but was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

At the moment, ATAP's best known project is a modular phone with 3-D printed parts called Project Ara, but the group's future endeavors may diverge into directions other than mobile phones. ATAP has already given us glimpses of where it might go, including temporary digital tattoos or pills that can act as security tokens in lieu of passwords.

After separating the group from the rest of Motorola Mobility, Google may even free the team to work with other research groups, such as the life extension project Google Calico; the Google X lab, which produced a diabetes detecting contact lens, the self-driving car, and Google Glass; and Boston Dynamics, the DARPA-backed robotics company Google acquired last December.

The big question is how much good any of these projects will do the company in the long run, especially since many of these projects seem to have little to do with Google's advertising driven business model. Even Google Glass – which has a clear business model and is actually used on the street – is still just an experimental project, not a mass produced consumer device.

But the company has a better track record with turning its blue sky research projects into commercial products than companies like Microsoft. Artificial intelligence software developed at Google X found its way into Android's voice recognition system, and much of the core software that runs its web infrastructure is based on work conducted by alumni of prestigious research organizations like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC.

At the very least, ATAP fits with Google – in a way the rest of Motorola did not.