Rather than dedicating budget space to a traditional research and development department, Hearst is leading the charge among mega-publishers on decentralizing its efforts in digital innovation.
“Trying to go in and teach a traditional IT team and ask them to do product development is obviously not in their traditional skill set. So we really focus on taking the traditional IT functions and pulling that into common teams so we can teach them to develop more custom product to work with the technical talent within the operating groups,” Hearst CTO Philip Wiser told Fast Company.
“We’re developing that culture so that this emerging wave of the next generation of technologists is really attracted to it. By bringing in talent from emerging media companies, pure online digital plays that are coming over to Hearst and finding the scale and support–I think that’s just starting to create a really nice, virtuous cycle within the company right now.”
The company is delegating content and product tech to internal developers, partners, contractors, and even college students.
To read more about Hearst’s R&D philosophy, visit FastCoLabs.com.
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