Hacking for Defense (H4D) @ Stanford – Week 1
SWJ Editor’s Note: Small Wars Journal will be providing regular updates as the teams progress through the course.
Introduction
We just had our first Hacking for Defense class and the 8 teams have hit the ground running.
They talked to 86 customers/stakeholders before the course started.
Presentations mentioned in this post can be viewed on the website.
Hacking for Defense is a new course in Stanford’s School of Engineering, where students learn about the nation’s security challenges by working with innovators inside the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community (DOD/IC). The course teaches students the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurship while they engage in what essentially is a national public service.
Hacking for Defense uses the same Lean LaunchPad Methodology adopted by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and proven successful in Lean LaunchPad and I-Corps classes with 1,000’s of teams worldwide. Over 70 students applied to this new Stanford course, 32 were selected to form 8 teams.
One of the surprises was the incredible diversity of the student teams – genders, nationalities, expertise. The course attracted students from all departments and from undergrads to post docs.
Before the course started, the instructors worked with the DOD/IC to identify 20 problems that the course could tackle. Teams then were free to select one of these problems as their focus for the course.
Most discussions about innovation of defense systems acquisition start with writing a requirements document. Instead, in this course the student teams and their DOD/IC sponsors will work together to discover “real problems” in the field and only then articulate the requirements required to solve them and deploy the solutions.
Hacking for Defense: Class 1
We started the first class with the obligatory overview slides. (Most of the students had already seen them during our pre-course information sessions but in attendance were team mentors seeing them for the first time.)
See the slides here
Then it was time for each of the 8 teams to tell us what they did before the course began. Their pre-course assignment was to talk to 10 beneficiaries. Each team was asked to present a 5-slide summary of what they learned:
- Slide 1 Title Slide
- Slide 2 Who’s On The Team
- Slide 3 Minimal Viable Product
- Slide 4: Customer Discovery
- Slide 5: Mission Model Canvas
As the teams made their presentations the teaching team offered a running commentary of suggestions, insights and direction.
Unlike other Lean Launchpad / I-Corps courses, we noticed that before we even gave the teams feedback on their findings, we were impressed by the initial level of sophistication most teams brought to deconstructing the sponsors’ problems.
First Week Presentations
Team aquaLink is working on a problem for divers in the U.S. Navy who work 60 to 200 feet underwater for 2-4 hours, but currently have no way to monitor their core temperature, maximum dive pressure, blood pressure and pulse. Knowing all of this would provide an early warning of hypothermia and the bends. The goal is to provide a wearable sensor system and apps that would allow divers to monitor their physiological conditions while underwater.
See the presentation here.
Team Fishreel is trying to combat “Catfishing”; where someone impersonates a specific person (i.e. celebrity), a person with a specific interest (i.e. Cake enthusiast) or an organization (i.e. Online book seller) or even an entire service, like an online retailer or financial or IT services provider. The team is working with the intelligence community to develop a technique to score how likely it is that a given online persona is who they claim to be, and how that conclusion was reached.
See the presentation here.
Team Guardian is seeking to protect soldiers from cheap, off-the-shelf commercial drones conducting Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. What happens when adversaries learn how to weaponize drones with bullets, explosives, or chemical weapons?
Slides 6 and 7 use the Value Proposition canvas to provide a deeper understanding of product/market fit.
See the presentation here.
Team Skynet is also using drones to provide ground troops situational awareness. (Almost the inverse of Team Guardian.)
Slides 6 – 8 use the Value Proposition canvas to provide a deeper understanding of product/market fit.
See the presentation here.
Team LTTT (Live Tactical Threat Toolkit) is providing assistance to other countries’ Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) teams – those attempting to disarm Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). They’re trying to develop tools that would allow foreign explosive experts to consult with their American counterparts in real time to disarm IED’s and to document key information about what they have found.
See the presentation here.
Team Narrative Mind is trying to determine how to use data mining, machine learning, and data science to understand, disrupt, and counter an adversary’s use of social media (ISIS use is one example). Current tools do not provide users with a way to understand the meaning within adversary social media content and there is no automated process to disrupt, counter and shape the narrative.
See the presentation here.
Team Capella is launching a constellation of satellites with synthetic aperture radar into space to provide the Navy’s 7th fleet with real-time radar imaging.
See the presentation here.
Pre-Computing the Problem and Solution
As expected, a few teams with great technical assets jumped into building the Minimum Biable Product (MVP) and were off coding/building hardware. It’s a natural mistake. We’re trying to get students to understand the difference between an MVP and a prototype and the importance of customer discovery (hard when you think you’re so smart you can pre-compute customer problems and derive the solution while sitting in your dorm room.)
Mentors/Liaisons/DIUx Support
Besides working with government sponsors, each team has a dedicated industry mentor. One of the surprises was the outpouring of support from individuals and companies who emailed us from across the country (even a few outside the U.S.) volunteering to mentor the teams.
Each team is also supported by an active duty military liaison officer drawn from Stanford’s Senior Service College Fellows.
Another source of unexpected support for the teams was from the Secretary of Defense’s DIUx Silicon Valley Innovation Outpost. DIUx has adopted the course and along with the military liaisons translate “military-speak” from the sponsors into “English” and vice versa.
Advanced Lectures
The Stanford teaching team uses a “flipped classroom” (the lectures are homework watched on Udacity.) However, for this course some parts of the business model canvas, which make sense in a commercial setting, don’t work in the DOD/IC. So we are supplementing the video lectures with in-class “advanced” lectures that explain the new Mission Model Canvas. (We’re turning these lectures into animated videos which can serve as homework for the next time the course is offered.)
The first advanced lecture was on Beneficiaries (customers, stakeholders, users, etc.) in the Department of Defense. Slides 4-7 clearly show that solutions in the DOD are always a multi-sided market. Almost every military program has at least four customer segments: Concept Developers, Capability Managers, Program Managers, and Users.
See the presentation here.
Each team is keeping a running blog of their customer interactions so one can virtually look over their shoulders as they talk to customers. From the look of the blogs week 2 is going to be equally exciting. Check in next week for an update.
Lessons Learned from Class 1
- Talented and diverse students seem eager to solve national defense problems
- Teams jumped on understanding their sponsors problems – even before the class
- We’ve put 800+ teams through the NSF I-Corps and another 200 or so through my classes, but this class feels really different. There’s a mission focus and passion to these teams I’ve not seen before