ARMY AL&T
program manager at the National Security Innovation Network, a DOD program office reporting to the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering through the Defense Innovation Unit. NSIN seeks to bring together defense, academic and entre- preneurial innovators to solve national security problems. Hacking for Defense is now an NSIN program, powered by BMNT and BMNT’s nonprofit partner, the Common Mission Project.
TEACHING IN A PANDEMIC As with everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a monkey wrench into how Hacking for Defense was taught. “We were really concerned because our class is really built on getting students out of the classroom and talking to real people,” said Newell.
Tere were positives and negatives from the restrictions brought on by quarantine and the move to virtual learning, Blank said. “Te good news is you could do interviews even easier, and get to more people, higher-ranking people, without gatekeepers, via Zoom,” he said. “And so access to people you needed to talk to was actually two to three times easier for students.” Te bad news was that students couldn’t immerse themselves into the community they were trying to solve problems for. No becoming a qualified diver, no taking part of a Navy SEAL basic train- ing course, no chance to don and move around in an explosive ordnance disposal suit, all of which have been part of various H4D classes. “And so students lost that,” Blank said.
NATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE One of the primary motivations at the start of Hacking for Defense was finding a way for students to serve their country in a nontraditional way. Te idea of national public service has struck a chord both with students and universities.
“I’m not going to serve in the armed forces,” Luke Truitt, a Hacking for Defense student at Duke University, said in a video produced by Duke on the H4D program. “Is there some way I can help? And I feel like this is one good step in that direction.”
Universities were also interested in finding a way for students to serve the greater good. “Educators involved in teaching entrepre- neurship … kind of self-formed into a group of folks who were interested in using entrepreneurship as a platform for national public service,” Newell said.
In coordination with Blank and Newell, the Common Mission Project convenes a twice-yearly Lean Innovation Educators Summit with entrepreneurs, professors and university leaders
“We thought we would teach the government how to better deliver problems and create a dialogue that was worthwhile.”
from around the world to discuss not only how to best teach entrepreneurship and ideas about promoting entrepreneurship for social good, Newell said. “Te first time we ran one I think we had about 90 educators from around the country. Te last one we did was about two months ago, we had over 600 educa- tors from 65 different countries join us.” Te next meeting, on June 3, focused on how to build back better after COVID, how to accelerate recovery and how to build more resilience into the economy. “All from the concept of building an H4D program at Stanford,” Newell said.
“My motivation for Hacking for Defense was not only just the class, but for national service,” Blank said. Ending the military draft in the 1970s and not replacing it with some sort of national service was a mistake, Blank believes. “We bought into a 40- to 50-year science experiment that says, ‘What happens when you disconnect your population from having skin in the game in foreign policy?’ and ‘What happens when you remove any national unifying process where different cultures, opinions and classes have to physically work together?’ Te result has not been a good outcome for the country. What we’ve gotten are these narrow silos or virtual ones like Facebook, and they don't end up well.
“Hacking for Defense was our contribution to bring diverse teams back together to serve the nation.”
For more information, contact the author at mbold@network-
runners.com.
MICHAEL BOLD provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. He is a writer-editor for Network Runners Inc., with more than 30 years of editing experience at newspapers, including the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Te Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri.
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