The hacker generation

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 &s;big and fast, complex and focused, large scale and agile&s; – words that were once &s;oxymorons in the world of business innovation&s;(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.