TO BE YOUNG AGAIN: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has created a Boston-based internal incubation lab, dubbed "HMH Labs," where the company's designers and developers will prototype and experiment with new technologies that "increase the accessibility of HMH's market-leading content," according to the release. Heading the team will be Claudia Reuter, former CEO of SchoolChapters, which HMH acquired in July 2014. (The publisher has acquired three other companies in the past year.)
With the move, HMH joins fellow education publishers that have also set up internal incubators and funds to spark innovation, often with the help of startups: Pearson (Catalyst), Macmillan (Macmillan New Ventures) and McGraw-Hill Education, which opened up its R&D lab (also in Boston) last year and considers itself a $2 billion, 125-year-old startup. (Perhaps Picasso might have been right when he supposedly said, "It takes a long time to become young.")
