It's created a new Incubator division to unplug engineers from the company's traditional product development process and give them the freedom of working in a startup atmosphere. Incubator's first project is the Symantec Protection Network (SPN), a hosted software project that the company rolled into the Incubator group when it was formed at the beginning of this year.

Symantec began rolling out the SPN in February, and since then it has given the green light to three other Incubator projects, according to Symantec Chief Technology Officer Mark Bregman.

The idea takes a cue from IBM's Emerging Business Opportunities program, which Bregman worked on in the late 1990s while at IBM. "I've felt for some years we haven't been doing enough to exploit internal innovation," he said. "It's very hard in a large company to start something small."

It turns out that there are very good reasons why it's hard to get small-scale projects off the ground at behemoths like Symantec and IBM. Dollars that could go to a risky startup idea might get a better return when invested in more established areas. And these startup ideas can take time to bear fruit, sometimes too long for business unit managers.

Still, Symantec executives see their Incubator as a critical way to keep the company growing in the long run. Plus, it's a motivator to retain engineers who have ideas that may not fit into the company's current product lines.