Over the nearly two decades that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has spent inventing things, he’s figured out that one of the most important ingredients of new ideas is something closer to play—experiments taken on not to profit immediately, or to develop a product, but because they’re flat-out fascinating. It’s what he figured out at MIT Media Lab, where he first became Internet Famous after his correspondence with a Nike customer service representative over getting the word “sweatshop” stitched into his sneakers went viral. And it’s what he promoted at the Brooklyn art and technology nonprofit where he built Eyebeam OpenLab, an open-source research and development space for artists.

Heck, it’s how BuzzFeed got started: Peretti didn’t start out to build an $850 million media company; While he was working at The Huffington Post, which he also helped start, Peretti started BuzzFeed as a side project to experiment with viral content. Now, as BuzzFeed hits 200 million views a month, Peretti is launching a new research and development lab to foster that type of serendipity internally. Says Peretti, “I think sometimes just having people who are doing undirected work as part of an organization, even if it’s a small percentage of our team, is something that will lead to good things.”

'Ideally, we’ll have some people who are a little bit feral and are obsessed with something they’ve been hacking on.' Jonah Peretti

Headquartered in the company’s new San Francisco bureau, The Open Lab for Journalism Technology and the Arts will be dedicated to coming up with new tools and technology that will benefit reporting and journalism—and releasing them as open source. BuzzFeed will bring on five fellows to work on interdisciplinary projects. Under the direction of bureau chief (and former WIRED staffer) Mat Honan, these fellows will be encouraged to tinker in whatever way they want to figure new stuff out.

In a blog post announcing The Open Lab, Honan writes that many of today’s media experiments with paywalls, new advertising models, or partnerships with Facebook or Snapchat, “are deeply boring to pretty much everyone who doesn’t depend on ads for a paycheck.”

Honan continues: “The logic of this new lab is: screw it. Let’s fly drones. Drones with lasers. And more to the point: let’s build drones with lasers and show everyone how to make them, too.”

Better Information

This summer, BuzzFeed will invite engineers, hackers, journalists and artists to submit proposals. The company will select four one-year fellows and one two-year senior fellow to come work in the lab. BuzzFeed has put together a killer advisory board he hopes fellows will look to for guidance. They include Peretti and the company’s publisher, Dao Nguyn; Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon; former Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, who is now CEO of drone startup 3D Robotics; and the artist-engineer Natalie Jeremijenko. Two of the fellows will be sponsored by GE and Eyebeam.

Peretti is open to any technology development project with the potential to advance journalistic goals and give consumers better information. “Ideally, we’ll have some people who are a little bit feral and are obsessed with something they’ve been hacking on,” says Peretti, “And then also some people who have been working at Google or Facebook for awhile, and want to do something new for a year that helps the world and is open-source.”

'The logic of this new lab is: screw it. Let’s fly drones. Drones with lasers.' Mat Honan

So what might come from this lab? In his post, Honan offers a few examples: what if, he asks, Buzzfeed could build a new algorithm through data mining that helps journalists better report on public transit? Score. Or, what about hardware for drones that allows you to keep the data when a drone crashes or a camera gives you better aerial angle of a crow? Win.

Those, of course, are just ideas. The point, Peretti says, is to give smart people space to pursue their hobbies. “Early viral web stuff seemed like a cool parlor trick,” he says, describing his early work distributing viral content with mobile and social tools. “And then five or ten years later, it seems to be the way the media industry works.” In similar fashion, Peretti wants to finance people to explore their obsessions – “Now it seems to be hacking health, drones, and certain kinds of AI,” he says—in hopes they become something bigger later.

Ultimately, Peretti sees this work as a public service, enabling the invention of new tools that anyone can use. “The idea of having things released under open licenses means they own it, BuzzFeed owns it, and the world owns it,” he says. That’s great for journalism. And, Peretti suspects, great for BuzzFeed.