Corporate Mentors play an integral role in H4D by mentoring talented student teams and lending them their technical expertise. In return Corporate Mentors establish new in-roads into the DOD and IC, gain early exposure to emerging problems, and develop unique bonds with the nation's top students.
The mentor’s role
By becoming a corporate mentor you will have the opportunity to:
Build a relationship with DoD customers, establishing new in-roads into the DOD and IC
Get early exposure to emerging problems
Gain access to a highly specialized talent pool from which to recruit potential employees
Position yourself as a thought-leader in innovation for the National Security Community
How to participate
Coach
Coach students as they tackle problems far beyond their own experiences
Empower
Provide access to advanced manufacturing or computing facilities for prototyping and testing
Fund
Work with universities to provide money for teams to travel, prototype, and test solutions.
As a mentor, you are an extension of the Teaching Team responsible for the success or failure of one team with four to five students.
In ten very short weeks your team has to get outside the classroom and test all their mission model hypotheses and help their sponsor better understand and address their problem.
Your role is to help the teams figure out how to test their hypotheses about their mission model. To the best of your ability, help them network, teach them how to send email and make phone calls and run customer surveys. Open your rolodex to whatever level you feel comfortable with.
Remember:
The H4D class is not an incubator or accelerator.
We are trying to give students models, heuristics, and experiences they can apply when they graduate. The class is about what they learn on the journey.
How it works
Mentors play an active role in the weekly coaching of a specific team. As a mentor you will:
Offer your team strategic guidance and wisdom:
Offer suggestions on mission achievement
Identify and correct gaps in the teams business, DoD, or IC knowledge
Provide your team with tactical guidance every week:
Meet with your team each week (by phone, Skype, or in person)
Review your team’s weekly presentation before they present
Comment weekly on your team’s Customer Discovery progress (this is hard to do unless you are familiar with the methodology)
Respond to the Teaching Team’s critique of your team
Rolodex help - “why don’t you call x? Let me connect you.”
Push your team to make 10-15 end user/stake holder contacts each week
Meet one-on-one with your team in person, if at all possible, at least twice during the quarter; Skype/Google Hangout etc. and conference calls are OK for other meetings
If necessary, check in with the Teaching Team at class 3 and 7 to discuss student progress
Help your team focus; guide them to pivot if the data points for the need to change
Attend your team’s final presentation
Become a corporate mentor
