Hacker Culture and the New Rules of Innovation

The hacker framing in this book clarifies the strategy and intent behind the signature methods employed by startup entrepreneurs-agile development, design thinking, and lean startup method, as well as, the cognitive, behavioural, and affective components of the mindsets required for these techniques to bear fruit. This is the realm of culture. Understanding startup entrepreneurship through the lens of hacker culture sheds light on the leadership style required to lead self-organising teams in startup and corporate settings. This roadmap is for business leaders and entrepreneurs who want to build organisations driven by innovative teams, and who are looking for frameworks to acheive this.

Fifteen years ago, a company was considered innovative if the CEO and board mandated a steady flow of new product ideas through the company’s innovation pipeline. Innovation was a carefully planned process, driven from above and tied to key strategic goals.

Nowadays, innovation means entrepreneurship, self-organizing teams, fast ideas and cheap, customer experiments. Innovation is driven by hacking, and the world’s most innovative companies proudly display their hacker credentials.

Hacker culture grew up on the margins of the computer industry. It entered the business world in the twenty-first century through agile software development, design thinking and lean startup method, the pillars of the contemporary startup industry. Startup incubators today are filled with hacker entrepreneurs, running fast, cheap experiments to push against the limits of the unknown. As corporations, not-for-profits and government departments pick up on these practices, seeking to replicate the creative energy of the startup industry, hacker culture is changing how we think about leadership, work and innovation.

This book is for business leaders, entrepreneurs and academics interested in how digital culture is reformatting our economies and societies. Shifting between a big picture view on how hacker culture is changing the digital economy and a detailed discussion of how to create and lead in-house teams of hacker entrepreneurs, it offers an essential introduction to the new rules of innovation and a practical guide to building the organizations of the future.