About the Hacking for Defense Course

About the course
Hacking For Defense®

What is Hacking for Defense?

Hacking for Defense (H4D) is a credit-bearing university class that offers the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community the opportunity to collaborate with talented student teams to develop innovative solutions to the nation’s emerging threats.

This unique approach allows H4D to engage multiple audiences. H4D facilitates:

Student Experience

The course teaches students to apply the Lean LaunchPad methodology to solve real national security problems.

DOD Connections

Through student teams, the DOD is provided an avenue to connect with problem-solvers from academia, the private sector, and other non-traditional DOD actors.

Agile Problem Solving

For government agencies, it aims to increase the speed at which national security organizations solve mission-critical problems.

University Benefits

For universities, it keeps their programs attached to real-world problems and provides their students with an experiential opportunity to become more effective in their chosen field, with a body of work to back it up.

Students present a solution during an H4D class.

The course was piloted at Stanford University in Spring 2016 and is expanding to universities across the country.

How the course works

Hacking for Defense uses the same teaching methodology proven successful in Lean LaunchPad and I-Corps classes taught at universities across the country. The difference in this class is that instead of teams working on their own ideas for a company, they address critical problems facing the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.

The problems students work to solve are submitted from problems submitted by various DoD sponsoring organizations.

During the course:

Each week the student teams interview at least 10 beneficiaries—military/government end users and stakeholders—to deeply understand the sponsoring organization’s problems and to develop a set of initial hypotheses about the solution to their problem.
Returning to class, the teams give a weekly 8-minute presentation about what they learned and demo their latest minimal viable prototypes.
They get feedback from the instructors, mentors and their classmates.
Each team documents the details of their beneficiary discovery interviews on their blog.
This enables teams, instructors and mentors to have immediate access to the progress of each team.

Over the weeks of the class, guided by a Mission Model Canvas, the teams learn more, they validate, invalidate or modify hypotheses through beneficiary discovery and build minimal viable prototypes (MVPs).

Each team is guided by two mentors, one from the sponsoring agency that proposed the problem and a second from the local community. Where possible, students are also assisted by a military/intelligence liaison with experience working in the DoD/IC. By the end of the class the students will understand what it takes to deploy a needed solution rapidly.

The collaboration between students and sponsors is valuable to the DOD and IC, and may be as important as the solutions derived by the students. Sponsors get to see first-hand the power of the Lean Methodology and how it can quickly develop solutions that are needed and wanted and can be deployed at speed.

Course Methodologies

H4D is built on the success of multiple methodologies and programs, including:

The Lean LaunchPad

The Lean LaunchPad Class: It’s the same, but different
Steve Blank Blog -- March 26, 2019

How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad
Udacity Online Course

Stanford’s Lean LaunchPad Course Sets Students on Entrepreneurial Trajectory
Stanford Technology Ventures Program Blog -- October 23, 2014

The Mission Model Canvas

“How do we use the Business Model Canvas if the primary goal is not to earn money, but to fulfill a mission? In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue?”

The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations
Steve Blank Blog -- February 23, 2016

Nation Science Foundation I-Corps Program

The National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program prepares scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the university laboratory and accelerates the economic and societal benefits of NSF-funded, basic-research projects that are ready to move toward commercialization.

Read more at nsf.gov.