[caption id=”attachment_22857” align=”alignnone” width=”2048”] Photo: U.S. Department of Defense[/caption]
We just finished our second Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. Eight teams presented their Lessons Learned presentations.
Hacking for Defense is a battle-tested problem-solving methodology that runs at Silicon Valley speed. It combines the same Lean Startup Methodology used by the National Science Foundation to commercialize science, with the rapid problem sourcing and curation methodology developed on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq by Colonel Pete Newell and the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force.
Goals for the Hacking for Defense Class
Our primary goal was to teach students entrepreneurship while they engaged in a national public service. Today if college students want to give back to their country they think of Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or Americorps or perhaps the US Digital Service or the GSA’s 18F. Few consider opportunities to make the world safer with the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community or other government agencies.
Our second goal was to teach our sponsors (the innovators inside the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC)) that there is a methodology that can help them understand and better respond to rapidly evolving asymmetric threats. That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timely and needed solutions.
Finally, we also wanted to show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.
The Class
Here’s a brief description of the Lean Methodology our students used:
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Our mantra to the students was that we wanted them to learn about “Deployment not Demos.” Our observation is that the DOD has more technology demos than they need, but often lack deep problem understanding. Our goal was to have the students first deeply understand their sponsors problem – before they started building solutions. As you can imagine with a roomful of technologists this was tough. Further we wanted the students to understand all parts of the mission model canvas, not just the beneficiaries and the value proposition. We wanted them to learn what it takes to get their product/service deployed to the field, not give yet another demo to a general. This meant that the minimal viable products the students built were focused on maximizing their learning of what to build, not just building prototypes.
(Our sponsors did remind us, that at times getting a solution deployed meant that someone did have to see a demo!)
The Hacking for Defense class was designed as “fundamental research” to be shared broadly and the results are not subject to restriction for proprietary or national security reasons. In the 10 weeks the students have, Hacking for Defense hardware and software prototypes don’t advance beyond a Technology Readiness Level 4 and remain outside the scope of US export control regulations and restrictions on foreign national participation.
Results
- Eight teams spoke to over 800 beneficiaries, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc.
- Seven out of the eight teams realized that the problem as given by the sponsor really wasn’t the problem. Their sponsors agreed.
- Received from a problem sponsor mid-live stream broadcast “we are working funding for this team now.”
- Over half the student teams have decided to continue working on national security projects after this class.
Each of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem and then gave an 8-minute presentation of their Lessons Learned over the 10-weeks. Each of their slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique.
The teams presented in front of several hundred people in person and online.
21st Century Frogman
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The video of the team presenting is below. You can see all their slides right below this video.
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VA Companion
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The video of the team presenting is below. You can see all their slides right below this video
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Austra Lumina
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Xplomo
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Seacurity
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The video of the team presenting is below. You can see all their slides right below this video.
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Surgency
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The video of the team presenting is below. You can see all their slides right below this video
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[slideshare id=76717303&w=468&h=384] If you can’t see the presentation slides click here
Broadcom
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The video of the team presenting is below. You can see all their slides right below this video.
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Librarian
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The Innovation Insurgency Spreads
Hacking for Defense is now offered at eight universities in addition to Stanford – Georgetown, University of Pittsburgh, Boise State, UC San Diego, James Madison University, University of Southern Mississippi, and later this year University of Southern California and Columbia University. We established Hacking for Defense.org a non-profit, to train educators and to provide a single point of contact for connecting the DOD/IC sponsor problems to these universities.
The Department of Defense has expanded their use of Hacking for Defense to include a classified version, and corporate partners are expanding their efforts to support the course and to create their own internal Hacking for Defense courses.
Another surprise was how applicable the “Hacking for X…” methodology is for other problems. Working with the State Department we offered a Hacking for Diplomacy class at Stanford.
Both the Defense and Diplomacy classes created lots of interest from organizations that have realized that this “Hacking for X…” problem-solving methodology is equally applicable to solving public safety, energy, policy, community and social issues internationally and within our own communities. This fall a series of new “Hacking for X…” classes will address these deserving communities. These include:
- Hacking for Impact (helping NGO’s and Nonprofits) at Berkeley
- Hacking for Energy at Columbia
- Hacking for Urban Resilience (Cities) at Stanford
- Hacking for Journalism at Stanford
If you’re interested in learning how to apply a “Hacking for X…” class in your workplace or school we’ve partnered with the 1776 incubator in Washington DC to offer a 2-day “Hacking for X…” certification course 26-27 July for those interested in learning how. Sign up here.
It Takes a Village
While I authored this blog post, these classes are a team project. The teaching team consisted of:
- Joe Felter a retired Army Special Forces Colonel with research and teaching appointments at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the Hoover Institution, and the dept. of Management Science and Engineering. Joe is the incoming Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia.
- Pete Newell is a retired Army Colonel currently a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the National Defense University’s Center for Technology and National Security Policy and CEO of BMNT Partners.
- Steve Weinstein a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve is CEO of MovieLabs the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios.
Our teaching assistants were all prior students: Issac Matthews our lead TA, and Melisa Tokmak, Jared Dunnmon, and Darren Hau.
We were lucky to get a team of 25 mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) who selflessly volunteered their time to help coach the teams. Thanks to the team Lean Startup mentors: Paul Dawes, Tom Bedecarre, Kevin Ray, Craig Seidel, Daniel Bardenstein, Roi Chobadi, Donna Slade, and Rafi Holtzman and other advisors; Lisa Wallace, Peter Higgins, Steve Hong, Robert Medve.
We were privileged to have the support of an extraordinary all volunteer team of professional senior military officers representing all branches of service attending fellowship programs at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). These included: Colonel Lincoln Bonner (US Air Force), Colonel Curtis Burns (US Army), Captain Kurt Clark (US Coast Guard), Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Helphinstine (US Air Force), Colonel Seth Krummrich (US Army)), Commander Leo Leos (US Navy), Lieutenant Colonel Eric Reid (US Marine Corps), Colonel Mike Turley (US Army), and Colonel Dave Zinn US Army. Additional volunteers from the active duty military providing support to our teams included Lieutenant Colonel Donny Haseltine (US Marine Corps), Captain Jason Rathje (US Air Force), Major Dave Ahern US Army) and, Major Kevin Mott (US Army).
And finally a special thanks to our course advisor Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense and Professor Emeritus, and Tom Byers, Professor of Engineering and Faculty Director, STVP.