It’s 9:30AM in Berlin and stylishly suited executives from one of the largest retail companies in the world are sitting in small clusters around the room surrounded by branded water bottles, half-filled notebooks, and a piles of Post-Its. Mixed in among them are startup entrepreneurs from across the world, renowned developers, and savvy venture capitalists — all toiling away to design a system where innovation and new ideas can flourish within their large enterprise.

Meanwhile Erica Smith is in Los Angeles, nervously preparing to pitch her app idea to a board of faux venture capitalists (who in reality are executives from her company). She’s a Managing Partner at a major insurance company who is participating in a mock “Shark Tank” event. Her company encourages employees to come up with new business ideas and plans which the “venture capitalists” will choose to invest in hoping of fund the next profit boosting piece of their company.

The Shark Tank model is just one of many that are fueling the new products and divisions of major companies worldwide who are seeking to innovate. This drive to innovate is not just in order to beat back an ever looming bottom line, but also an attempt to compete with the numerous startups eating large corporations’ lunches.

Watching many industries fall prey to the agile development, new business models, and rapid growth of startups, smart industry leaders are turning to the methods of those very same startups to foster new innovation within their own companies in unique and ingenious ways.

Employee sponsored innovation

The simulated investor pitch is one of the more common approaches to promote innovation. AT&T’s Foundry runs a similar program called The Innovation Pipeline (TIP) which touts itself as “a dynamic online crowd-sourcing platform that brings together the creative talent of AT&T employees.” It is reported that more than 130,000 workers have participated in TIP, a number that is equivalent to more than half of AT&T’s workforce.

By harnessing the knowledge and inspiration of their staff, AT&T is able to make more astute business decisions. Employees frequently have a more candid understanding of their customers’ needs than executives who are often too far removed from user feedback. This model of human-centered design and user feedback is a page right out of an early-stage startup’s product development playbook.

In a very startup-esque manner, the best ideas can come from unlikely places. With AT&T’s sales and marketing power, those ideas can become full-fledged, successful products rather than languish in the hands of less resource-rich startups. Over 37,000 ideas have been submitted to TIP since its inception in 2009 — with a number of them moving on to become staples among AT&T’s offerings.