Hackonomy: Create value by breaking things
Most think that the word "hacker" sounds negative, but not all hackers are bad. Instead, hackers and hack-thinking are the source of a monumental, positive shift in business, technology, startups and culture all over the world. Hackers can create immense value by breaking things, whether it’s breaking from tradition, process, or simply “the way we’ve always done things.” A new hacking economy–or “hackonomy”–is spreading quickly across industries, from software to hardware, aviation to space exploration. Hacking is even changing less obvious parts of human life, like dating. And, of course, the hackonomy has a huge impact on marketing.
See the presentation slides below:
Session Notes
Courtesy of Karine Bengualid from Brought to you by the Letter K
How do you break yourself? How do you break your process? How do you break your organization? But more importantly, how do you unlock growth from that breaking?
Mobile has had impact on every aspect of life: dating, religion, parenting, etc.
It started in the ‘50s with TV advertising. The brands that jumped in saw that consumption was beginning to eclipse investment. When you identify those true deltas is when you can create a competitive advantage that lasts for a long time before others catch up.
Today, of seven billion people on Earth, 5.1 billion of them have a cell phone. (And 96 percent of millennials have a cell phone.) Forty percent of media is consumed on a mobile device, yet less than 10 percent of global media spending goes into true mobility. That leaves a lot of opportunity for us to challenge the digital world, and even humanity, to make things better and more applicable to today’s world or tomorrow’s needs.
One example of this is how hackers break Facebook every day. This allows them to recreate Facebook in a better way, over and over again. But it’s not just the hackers who help rebuild Facebook, it’s also its users. It’s about accepting how someone is using/doing something (breaking it) and building on it anew to make it actionable.
How do you hack media?
Rethink mobile → Create a utility for mobile (like Uber).
Real-time engagement → How do you create real-time organizations? You experience something here and a product comes out immediately.
Monetize media → How do you begin to sell intellectual property? People buy with their money or attention.
Aspiration + allocation → You can aspire to be anything you want, but if you don’t allocate the resources and the time, you will never get there.
TV / video → Continuously evolving, from PVRs to live videos on social media, you need to keep up with the times and consumers or you’ll be left behind.
Culture vs. cluster → We no longer have to cluster consumers around age grounds because we have the data to target them.
Never be afraid to fail, because lessons come from failure. And don’t be afraid to try things that others say aren’t possible. Put yourself in the mindset of truly being able to absorb new ideas and think through them creatively.
Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Bonin Bough: “The best way to predict the future is to hack it.”