ABSTRACT

The story of how hacker culture moved from the margins of the software industry to centre stage in business innovation is a tale of our times. Hacker entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are using the same practices and principles to build agile organizations from scratch, businesses designed to be 'big and fast, complex and focused, large scale and agile' – words that were once 'oxymorons in the world of business innovation'(Brown, 2015). Hacker mindsets and practices shape the operation of some the most successful tech companies of the twenty-first century, including Apple, Facebook and Google. Students were hacking the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus for decades prior to the birth of computer hacking. In 1991, hacking was a fringe element of internet culture. The 1983 Matthew Broderick film, War Games, had stereotyped hackers as teenaged computer nerds, clever but essentially clueless, mucking around in the margins of the military–industrial complex.