What do you mean by ‘innovation’? Five rules for hacker generation companies
‘Innovation’ is a contested word. Like all words, it has multiple uses and designations, which cohere in different contexts. When a corporate leader talks about innovation, she or he is referring to a set of budgeting models, management processes, and stage gate systems that enable a company to maintain a flow of products through its innovation pipeline. When a startup entrepreneur talks about innovation, she or he is referring to a fast-paced process of ideation, customer engagement and concept validation. When an artist talks about innovation, she or he may be referring to a new creative process or a new way of delivering content to customers and audiences.
Tony Davila, Marc Epstein, and Robert Shelton, authors of the book, Making Innovation Work: How To Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It (2013), argue for a traditional view of innovation. In their view, innovation has hardly changed since the Industrial Age. Innovation is something that large companies do. It requires significant investment and technical expertise. While rank and file employees have a role to play in innovation, they are by no means central to the process. This top-heavy and exclusionary vision of innovation reflects the hierarchies and carefully policed divisions of labor that have defined large companies since the birth of the modern corporation.
The new concept of innovation that is emerging today challenges this paradigm and associated conception of work. It democratizes innovation, making innovation part of the everyday flow of work life generally. This new concept originated in the software industry, where small teams have the freedom to collaboratively define targets, goals and processes and create products and services through iterated sprints. Whereas corporate innovation is a top down process requiring considerable management overheads, the practices used in software innovation shift decision-making authority to teams, and task managers with playing a role akin to startup founders, periodically checking in on teams, offering guidance and support, defending them from company politics, and providing a budget for experiments.
This new concept of innovation and its associated suite of practices are deeply indebted to hacking. ‘Hacking’ is another contested term. Most people associate hacking with the criminal act of breaking into computers to steal data and plant virus. But hacking is fundamentally a problem solving activity. It is necessary to look beyond the media’s obsession with ‘black hat hacking’ and consider how hackers (and their DIY electronics enthusiast cousins, makers) approach innovation to appreciate the new innovation culture that is emerging around us today.
Hacker culture first emerged in the early days of computing. It crossed a threshold of credibility in the 1990s with the success of Linux and the open source programming movement. Linux established openness, collaboration and iterative development as a powerfully effective way of organizing work. In the wake of the dot com crash of 2000–2002, a new generation of hacker entrepreneurs set up shop in Silicon Valley and other tech capitals of the world. Their love of hacking, gifting, and wild experiments set the tone for the Web 2.0 era, and fed into the design of the participatory social tools that have since disrupted businesses, enabled revolutions and reshaped the world.
Today, hacker culture is spilling out of the startup economy and flowing into the corporate world, where it is linked to the call for agile work spaces, collaborative work and social purpose. This culture is impacting on organizational politics and business strategy, in addition to innovation.
Here are 5 key insights for business leaders who want to enable a culture of hacking and creative experimentation.
1. Hacking is a hands-on discipline
When pondering a question, it is easy to tie oneself in knots speculating about the answer before actually doing anything. Similarly, when presented with a problem, we can spend any length of time fretting over possible solutions before trying out any one of them. Hackers leapfrog these intellectual roadblocks by trusting their gut, whipping-up a hypothesis, and building something that shines light on the problem. They cut the pondering phase short and move as quickly as possible into making and learning.
Steven Levy, author of the seminal book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), calls this the ‘hands-on imperative’. Getting hands on with problems is imperative for enabling a hacker innovation culture. Establishing the hands-on imperative focuses people on experiments and ensures that good ideas are rapidly converted into promising initiatives. It ensures that everyone in the company is devoted to designing and shipping innovation.
2. Hackers take problems personally
‘Not my problem’. This is the standard escape clause for disengaged employees in traditionally managed companies. Before anyone touches a problem, they check their job description to ensure they have the appropriate clearance.
Hackers don’t wait for permission to get hands-on with problems. If the problem interests them, they own it. It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so hackers leap ahead without asking for it. They run practical experiments aimed to clarify problems and identify new possible solutions.
This level of autonomy makes many managers nervous. It undermines their authority. This creates the bizarre situation where managers will actually crack down on employees for showing initiative. In doing so, they are effectively saying: ‘Innovation is not part of your job description’. This mindset is precisely what the new hacker innovation culture calls into question.
In companies where hacker culture is encouraged, everyone has the right to be innovative. Instead of locking the spirit of innovation in a lab, innovation is distributed across the organisation. This implies a different, and much more democratic, way of thinking about innovation. Innovation becomes everyone’s job and therefore part of the everyday life of the organisation.
3. Hackers learn through practical experiments
Hacking involves engaging with problems through fast, cheap experiments. Each experiment is designed to test a hypothesis that points towards a possible solution. Hackers build low-cost prototypes of solutions and test them with the people exposed to the problem, be they customers, users, or fellow employees. If the solution stands to impact people outside these groups, hackers will engage these stakeholders as well.
By running experiments, hackers learn about the problems they are dealing with. They validate or discount their initial hypotheses on the basis of what they learn. A good experiment can produce valuable insights. Hackers use these insights to iterate their designs and retest them. By cycling this process as fast as possible, hackers develop a practical understanding of the problems they are dealing with and the complex systems that produce them. This process of prototyping, testing, learning, and iteration continues until they have either developed a workable solution or failed in the attempt, at which point they ‘pivot’ their design and try something different.
This is the practical core of hacker innovation culture. We see it in each of the three main contemporary expressions of hacker innovation culture — agile development, design thinking, and lean startup method. Each of these approaches has its own unique strategies and methods, developed in response to the inherent demands of its field of application. But the basic format of prototyping, testing, learning, and iteration is the same in each case.
4. Hackers are gifters
Sharing for impact, or gifting, is a crucial element of the hacker innovation game. Hackers believe that ‘information should be free’. But the gifting dimension of hacker culture goes well beyond just ‘sharing goods around’.
Gifting operates as a kind of governance system. It requires a transparent space of visibility such that everyone who is involved in a project see what is being contributed to it. In this way, participants are able to earn reputation capital for their hacks and other contributions. This incentivises a generative mindset and gifting behaviors — contributions above and beyond the call of duty that are specifically intended to benefit the project and its participants.
This is a totally different governance system to the incentive and reward schemes that are traditionally deployed to drive innovative activities. Hackers are not motivated by money. For the most part, they are motivated by the intrinsic rewards of the innovation game itself. This explains why hackers will leap into hands-on hacking and experimentation even when the chances of financial reward are slim (as is the case in the startup industry) or when there is no chance of financial reward at all. Hackers hack because the love innovation. Through hacking and gifting, hackers learn and grow together.
5. Hackers look for meaningful work
Hackers earn reputation capital from contributing to projects that count. The most productive instances of hacker innovation culture are animated by a sense of social purpose.
It all comes down to the question: how meaningful is the work? Generally, hackers seek to make the best use of their time by focusing on the most meaningful problems they can tackle. They look especially for problems that they are uniquely placed to contribute to given their skill set. Typically, when a hacker finds the opportunity to contribute his or her skill-set to a project that counts, he or she will passionately engage with it.
Passion is the wellspring of innovation. It can’t be turned on like a tap, but it can be tapped by allowing people to dedicate themselves to meaningful work.
Sharing is caring. If you like this post, please pass it on.
Tim Rayner is the author of Hacker Culture and the New Rules of Innovation (2018). He teaches at UTS Business School in Sydney, Australia.
