On Tuesday June 9th, NADIC participated in a very interesting zoom presentation on Hacking for Defense Lessons Learned. The event featured a keynote by General Jim Mattis USMC (ret.) and 26th United States Secretary of Defense.
Hacking For Defense provided the following description of the event:
“Hacking For Defense is a Stanford-designed class (now a national program managed by the National Security Innovation Network) where student teams work on real-world national security problems given to them by sponsors in the Department of Defense. In just 10 weeks they've spoken to over 1,000 stakeholders, beneficiaries, and warfighters, and have built a series of Minimal Viable Products to test their proposed solutions.
Each of the eight teams described their journey - the Lessons Learned - from a DOD problem to their current understanding and suggestions on how to solve it.
These presentations illustrated the power of what small dedicated teams using the Lean Methodology can solve with limited time and resources.
The course was designed by Steve Blank, Joe Felter and Pete Newell and led by Steve Weinstein,Tom Bedecarré and Jeff Decker with advisors including Bill Perry, Arun Majumdar, Sally Benson, Tom Byers, and John Mitchell. Learn more about the course and this year's teams at http://h4d.stanford.edu/.”
The presentations were very interesting and provided further arguments for the importance of innovation. The Hacking for Defense course is the inspiration for the NADIC Hacking for Allies program being run in partnership with the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Washington D.C, Innovation Norway (IN) and the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI).
The goal of NADIC's H4A is to broaden the exposure of DoD to innovative teams and technology from Allied nations that can potentially solve challenging problems common to both the US and its Allies. In this iteration of H4A, entrepreneur teams from Norway will work on several problems common to the US and Norway, and including problem sponsors from both the US and Norwegian militaries helping them to validate the problem and discover product-mission fit. Four NADIC members are currently part of the H4A program, Alva Industries, Excitus, Fieldmade and Ubiq Aerospace.
If you missed the Hacking for Defense Lessons Learned Presentations, you may access the recording by following the link below: