Incubator frees staffers from big business restrictions. For example, Incubator employees can ignore human resources guidelines and pay employees whatever they want, and they can veer from company rules that require 24-hour worldwide tech support. At the same time, they can borrow marketing resources or technology from other parts of the company, Bregman said. "It's a funny balance of being unfettered, but able to borrow and steal and use anything they want."

Early on, Bregman realized that a board of the company's top executives, including Bregman and CEO John Thompson, would need to sign off on Incubator projects if they were to have any chance of success. In part, that's to make sure that other parts of Symantec help out with new project. But it's also necessary to keep in-house entrepreneurs on track. "The executives on the board have to continually remind them that they have permission to break the rules," Bregman said.

Incubator had been entertaining new ideas mainly via word of mouth, but a few months ago the program was opened to all Symantec employees. Now they can visit a Web site on the company's intranet and submit their own business plan, much as they would to a venture capital firm, said Arthur Wong, senior vice president in charge of Incubator.

At a recent meeting of Symantec's technical staff in Salt Lake City, Bregman told company engineers that the program was getting high marks from Thompson, who told him, "the ideas we're getting through the Incubator are better than the ones we're paying the consultants to give us," Bregman said.

If things work out with the Incubator, it will have successful projects generating a hundred million dollars in annual revenue within the next few years, according to Bregman.