There is a lot of blog posts about ‘outbound open source’ contributions in small or big companies. Example: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/open-sourcing-projects-guide-getting-started/. Especially when starting a new open source project, many companies go through IP compliance checks and evaluate which license to apply (MIT vs Apache etc). Often times there is an approval process involved by the various parties (management, lawyers, process owners, etc).
Does your company have a tool for this process? If so which one? All I found so far was some companies leveraging Jira workflows.