HACKING FOR DEFENSE TURNS 5
• The course is currently being taught at 47 universities nation- wide, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy, Defense Acquisition University and the Naval Postgraduate School.
• Hacking for Defense is a DOD program of record, funded by Congress.
• More than 2,000 students have completed the program, addressing more than 750 national security problems.
• Hacking for Defense has created a new platform for national service, engaging students in helping to keep the country safe and secure.
• It has directly led to the formation of 14 startups, including the satellite company Capella Space; the mobile training plat- form Learn to Win, which is changing how fighter pilots are trained; Anthro Energy, which developed a flexible nonflam- mable lithium ion battery being used by wearable electronics makers in straps or wristbands (and whose CEO was named to the Forbes 30 under 30); and Lumineye, which developed a device that helps first responders see through walls and which was the grand prize winner of xTechSearch 2.0, sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisi- tion, Logistics and Technology.
• It's spawned a series of sister programs helping to address other real-world problems, including Hacking for Diplomacy, Hack- ing for Local, Hacking for Oceans and Hacking for Homeland Security, among others. In the United Kingdom, Hacking for MOD (Ministry of Defense) is being taught at seven universi- ties. In Australia, Hacking for National Security was piloted at the University of New South Wales earlier this year.
BIG HILL TO CLIMB Newell had gone into the class just hoping they could attract enough students. “We thought we were just going to teach a class at Stanford,” he said. Tere was much more to it, including these challenges: “One is that we could convince the government to not just give up problems, but also participate in the class,” Newell said. “Te second one was that we could convince Stanford to let us teach the class. And … that we're going to attract enough students to make it interesting. And at the same time build the network around them, which means we had to recruit mentors and we had to recruit advisers. So our expectation was that we would pull off a moderately successful class and that it would be something we repeated once a year.”
But Blank, ever the entrepreneur, had visions of much more. Blank’s Lean Startup methodology had revolutionized the way startups set up shop in Silicon Valley and beyond and had landed him on the cover of the Harvard Business Review. “On day one, my thinking was there's no sense creating a new class if you're not going to try to make it a national program,” Blank said in an April interview. “Tat was my idea from the get-go.”
His Lean Startup method boiled down to three basic steps:
• Articulate your hypotheses: What problem are you trying to solve? Who’s your customer? What solution do customers want to grab out of your hands?
• Get out of the building. Talk to at least 100 potential customers and stakeholders about your hypotheses. Have you identified the problem correctly? Can you validate your hypotheses?
• Build a minimum viable product (MVP)—the smallest thing that will get you the most learning at that point in time. It can be a wireframe, a PowerPoint, hardware, etc. Get customer feedback. If the feedback is good, refine and improve your MVP until it’s ready to roll out as a finished product. If it’s bad, figure out where you went wrong and then pivot. This way, if you’ve failed, you’ve failed early and inexpensively.
TEST EARLY
A member of Team AquaLink conducts an underwater test on an experimental GPS buoy as part of the Hacking for Defense course at Stanford University. (Photo by Team AquaLink)
Blank had expertise turning his Lean methodology into a success- ful classroom experience. In 2011, he was asked by the National Science Foundation to find a way for its scientists to turn their research into viable commercial products. He developed the Innovation (I-Corps), which is now considered the standard for science commercialization in the U.S. and has been adopted by other government agencies including the National Institutes of Health. I-Corps teams have created more than 1,100 startup businesses.
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Army AL&T Magazine
Summer 2021
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