The media companies’ R&D lab craze has now spread from U.S. to U.K.: the Telegraph Media Group has set up an in-house tech R&D lab dedicated to creative editorial projects. Aashish Chandarana, former innovations and production executive for BBC Sport, has been hired to head up the lab and has hired three developers and editorial staff for a project exploring new ways of integrating user-generated content on the Telegraph.co.uk website, reports Guardian. By next year, there will be 10 people working in the lab.

In U.S., NYT and then Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) opened up R&D labs on the newspapers side, following efforts of Internet companies such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo.