With nearly 100 employees, the Symantec Protection Network is the largest Incubator project, by far. Other efforts employ as few as three staffers.

Symantec isn't offering many details on these other Incubator ideas. One has to do with the health care sector. One of Bregman's favorite projects is building a kind of online identity information broker to help people know who to trust on the Internet.

"If I want to go online and buy wine ... how do I prove I'm over 21? There's no mechanism to do that today," Bregman said. "But we think there are some interesting mechanisms that you can put in place that would provide a service -- a broker -- to validate assertions."

The identity project is like nothing Symantec has done before, but it's representative of the new ideas that Symantec wants to encourage. "It's a completely different business model," Bregman said. "How does it get paid for? We're not sure yet."