How to encourage "corporate hacking"?

We have created with a few friends from large companies a space for exchanging practices on what we could call “corporate hacking”. This portmanteau designates employees who manage to seize the means made available to them by their function to deviate (in a positive sense) the trajectory of their organization. The appearance of these new generation “hackers” who question the dominant ways of thinking within the company raises the question of the necessary renewal of internal R&D policies (research and development). Indeed, today an R&D department, however efficient it may be, most often fails to anticipate the changes which are necessary for the survival of the group (see in this regard the illuminating contribution to be found here). The house has indeed often a compass which goes in the direction of the clouds. Only someone external to be careful disruption elements.

However, this is precisely the role that the “corporate hacker” can take. Even if he occupies a position internally, he often embodies this obstacle to going around in circles. On the condition, however, that the organization is intelligent enough to leave it on the sidelines and paradoxically give it the means to remain untimely. A "coporate hacker" does not care about a bonus or a career advance. What matters above all to him is to receive recognition from the community to which he belongs. It is therefore important to give him time and to open up spaces - of the fab-lab type - in which he can experiment, confront others. It is only at this price that he can be this positive conspirator who creates change.

In the same vein, I wanted to echo here the vision defended by Duc Ha Duong, of Officience, one of the active members of the barbaric 100 (see here). To the question of how to explain the bankruptcy of our great institutions, Duc Ha Duong maintains that the form of salaried employment as implemented in very large companies (which results in a set of constraints and brakes on individual initiative) is today a less and less attractive model. According to him, the big change to come in the world of work, will be a shift from employment to the cause: we will not look at all costs for a job but first of all causes to defend, and we will go and work where we believe that the cause will be the best defended ... If this observation is founded, it is undoubtedly time in our schools, not to struggle any more to train for trades (which in any case are bound to disappear) but to bring out convictions and equip our students to successfully defend them. To meditate.