The Hacking for Defense Empire is expanding—and this time, to continental Europe. This morning, the Common Mission Project (CMP) announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that they’re officially launching the Hacking for Defense (H4D) academic program in Germany in partnership with the University of the Bundeswehr (UniBwM).
The program—founded by Pete Newell, Steve Blank, and Joe Felter at Stanford a decade ago—takes the Lean Startup methodology pioneered by Blank and applies it to defense and national security. Basically, it took Silicon Valley and brought it—along with students’ ideas—to the Pentagon.
Since its launch, the program has been taught in nearly 100 universities in the US, UK, and Australia, and has spun out 80 student-led startups that have raised over $200M in capital. Now, they’re taking the idea to one of the countries (and organizations) at the forefront of the fight in Ukraine.
“We are teaching German army officers, at the very beginning of their career, how to solve problems differently, how to be entrepreneurial, how to harness innovation methods, to tackle problems differently,” CMP Co-Founder and Chair Alison Hawks told Tectonic. “We believe that this is a core part of Europe’s resilience and readiness.”
Hackercore: If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve probably heard of H4D, but we’ll start with a little backgrounder for the uninitiated.
- The idea of the whole thing is to identify the “hardest problems” in defense and national security and bring the “brightest university talent” together in prototype teams to solve them.
- The idea stems from Blank’s Lean Startup methodology—start with a problem, not a solution.
- Over the course of 11 weeks, students identify problems faced by the defense and security communities (in this case, the Bundeswehr—the German military—and the broader European security system). Often, the problems are brought to them by defense and security professionals themselves.
- Students then break into teams and basically form mini start-ups to develop solutions to these problems. There is a lot of emphasis on investigation—students dive deep into the communities they’re solving problems for.
- Once they come up with the prototype solution, students then present it to natsec professionals, executives, and investors.
“We knew that to harness our nation’s talent, we needed to give them hard problems to work on,” Hawks said. “Students wanted to work on hard national security and defense problems…This could be…a contribution to national service in ways that don’t interrupt their quote unquote life course, like joining the Peace Corps or joining the Army.”
Startups that have come out of H4D include Capella Space and Usul.
Build the base: Hawks framed the expansion into Germany as part of a broader push for long-term European resilience.
“The war in Ukraine has made this an imperative,” she said. “How do you build a resilient society that will have to rebuild once we have a peace accord? Then, how do we rearm? If we’re going to rearm…we need people to care about defense, and we need people to care about the problems that we’re trying to solve with rearmament, resilience, and readiness.”
Given the whole “Germany is not the US or the UK” thing, we asked whether the course would be tweaked at all for the Bundeswehr.
“That’s what we need to learn,” Hawks said. “Every culture has its own idiosyncrasies. The partnership with the University of the Bundeswehr is to understand how we make this work for Germany. But we are confident that the methodology will give them the impact that we’ve been able to demonstrate over the past 10 years.”
On the edge: From here, the plan is to expand to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Hawks said, and then to another European country that is “investing a lot of money” in defense in October. Then, from there, to the Baltics and the Nordics—the European front with Russia.
“Our vision is to have this program in every university in Europe,” she said, “To give everyone the opportunity to solve hard problems on behalf of defense and national security.”