Hacking for Defense Educators guide and Syllabus

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License
Hacking for Defense (H4D):
Solving National Security Issues with the Lean Launchpad
Educators Guide
http://hacking4defense.stanford.edu
Steve Blank, Joe Felter, Pete Newell
1st
Edition, Revision 7.6

Hacking For Defense (H4D) Educators Guide steve blank rev 7.6 Page i
Table of Contents
Preface ...............................................................................................................................................1
Purpose ........................................................................................................................................................1
Scope............................................................................................................................................................1
Why This Class?..................................................................................................................................2
Problem........................................................................................................................................................2
Solution ........................................................................................................................................................3
How Does This Class Work?...............................................................................................................5
How Is This Document Organized?...............................................................................................................5
1. Soliciting DOD/IC Project Topics of Interest..................................................................................7
Selecting Appropriate Class Problems..........................................................................................................7
DOD/IC Topic Submission Guidelines .......................................................................................................7
DOD Hacking for Defense (H4D) - Problem Proposal (Sample)....................................................................8
Brokered Interviews .................................................................................................................................8
Topic Visibility ..........................................................................................................................................8
Multiple Teams Per Topic.........................................................................................................................9
DOD/IC Benefits ...........................................................................................................................................9
DOD/IC Responsibilities................................................................................................................................9
DOD/IC Support Needed for Hacking for Defense as a National Program.................................................10
2. Forming Student Teams of Solution Providers .......................................................................11
Class Listing ................................................................................................................................................11
Admission to the Class ...............................................................................................................................11
Team Formation: Brown Bag Lunches, Information Sessions/Mixers & Office Hours ...............................12
Marketing the Class ...............................................................................................................................12
Team Application Form..............................................................................................................................12
Team Interviews.........................................................................................................................................12
Team Makeup and Roles............................................................................................................................13
Admission...................................................................................................................................................13
Mentor Support..........................................................................................................................................13
Amount of Work.........................................................................................................................................13
Pre-class Work............................................................................................................................................14
Intellectual Property / Open Source Policy ................................................................................................14
Sharing...................................................................................................................................................14
Intellectual Property...............................................................................................................................14
3. Assembling the Teaching Team..................................................................................................15
Faculty........................................................................................................................................................15
Instructor's role......................................................................................................................................15
Teaching Assistant .................................................................................................................................16
Mentors and Advisors ................................................................................................................................16
Military Liaisons.....................................................................................................................................17
Role of the DOD/IC mentors...................................................................................................................17
Role of the Local Mentors ......................................................................................................................18
What mentors do week-to-week:...........................................................................................................18

Hacking For Defense (H4D) Educators Guide steve blank rev 7.6 Page ii of 108
Mentor/Advisor Outreach......................................................................................................................19
Advisors......................................................................................................................................................19
Mentor/Advisor Weekly Email ...............................................................................................................19
4. The Class Roadmap......................................................................................................................20
Pre-class Work............................................................................................................................................20
Weekly Class Flow ......................................................................................................................................20
Minimum Viable Product Deliverables.......................................................................................................21
Course Length: 10-Week Quarter or 12-Week Semester...........................................................................21
10- and 12-Week Course Logistics .........................................................................................................21
5. Teaching Team Roles and Tools...................................................................................................23
Team Teaching ...........................................................................................................................................23
Best Teaching Practices..............................................................................................................................23
Lean Process...............................................................................................................................................23
Lectures/Flipped Classroom.......................................................................................................................23
LaunchPad Central .....................................................................................................................................24
Office Hours ...............................................................................................................................................25
Textbooks and Online Video Lectures........................................................................................................26
Grading.......................................................................................................................................................26
Guidelines for Team Presentations............................................................................................................27
Weekly Lessons Learned Presentation Format ..........................................................................................27
Instructor Pre-Course Preparation.............................................................................................................28
Appendix A – DOD/IC Accepted Problem Topics ............................................................................31
Wearable Sensors and Apps for Divers ..................................................................................................31
Virtual Advice and Assistance Toolkit ....................................................................................................32
From Cybernetic to Organic: Organizing to enhance networks, adaptability, and resiliency. ...............33
Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief Mobile and Web based App................................................33
Distributed, Disposable, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance ..............................................35
Open Source Analytics for Indications and Warnings (I&W). Sponsor – (JIDA).....................................36
Appendix B – Team Application forms ...........................................................................................37
Appendix C – Sample Weekly Email Updates to Mentors ..............................................................40
Appendix D – Business Model and Value Proposition Canvas, Mission Model Canvas .................41
Appendix E: LaunchPad Central.......................................................................................................46
Appendix F – The Relentlessly Direct Teaching Style......................................................................48
Appendix G: Sample Syllabus MS&E 297 - Hacking for Defense.....................................................50
Course Summary and Schedule..................................................................................................................51
Class Strategy .............................................................................................................................................51
Instructional Method .............................................................................................................................53
Class Culture...........................................................................................................................................53
Amount of Work.....................................................................................................................................53
Pre-class Preparation.............................................................................................................................53
Projects ..................................................................................................................................................53
Only Project............................................................................................................................................53
Shared Materials....................................................................................................................................54

Hacking For Defense (H4D) Educators Guide steve blank rev 7.6 Page iii of 108
Your Work in this Class is Open Sourced ................................................................................................54
Deliverables............................................................................................................................................54
Grading Criteria......................................................................................................................................54
Guidelines for team presentations.............................................................................................................56
Pre-class preparation for day 1 of the class ...............................................................................................56
Workshop 1 before March 29th
How to Work with the DOD/IC Community .................................59
Class 1 March 29th
Mission Model/Customer Development ..........................................................60
Workshop 2 Customer Discovery in the DOD/IC; Theory and Practice, What’s a Minimal Viable
Product in the DOD/IC............................................................................................................................63
Class 2 April 5th
Team Presentation: Value Proposition ................................................................64
Class 3 April 12th
Team Presentation: Customer Segments............................................................66
Class 4 April 19th
Team Presentation: Deployment........................................................................68
Class 5 April 26th
Team Presentation: Getting Buy-In / Creating an Insurgency.............................70
Class 6 May 3rd
Team Presentation: Mission Value......................................................................72
Class 7 May 10th
Team Presentation: Activities/Resources.............................................................74
Class 8 May 17th
Team Presentation: Partners/Costs ....................................................................76
Class 9 May 24th
Lessons Learned Prep Day ...............................................................................78
Class 10 May 31st
Team Presentations of Lessons Learned ............................................................82
Syllabus Appendix A: Instructional Method ...........................................................................................83
Syllabus Appendix B: Class Culture and Workload ................................................................................85
Syllabus Appendix C: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)......................................................................86
Syllabus Appendix D: Faculty.................................................................................................................90
Syllabus Appendix E: Using LaunchPad Central.....................................................................................99

Hacking For Defense (H4D) Educators Guide steve blank rev 7.6 Page 1 of 108
Preface
Purpose
The goal of this document is to open source the Hacking for Defense (H4D) class and allow
you to teach it in your school. In this document we’ll give you the theory of why we
created the Hacking for Defense (H4D) class and the practice of how we have run it, as a
guide/cookbook for a class. As educators, we expect you will adapt the class to your own
school and curriculum as appropriate.
Scope
The Hacking for Defense (H4D) class teaches students how to build products and services
in extremely short periods of time that military and other government agency end users
want and need, by using Lean Methods. It also gives students hands-on experience in
understanding, and working with the Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC) on
actual current problems they currently confront. Students learn how to innovate at speed
and address these pressing problems, making the world a safer place.
In return, the class offers the DOD and IC Community an untapped pool of technical and
creative resources eager and able to provide immediate solutions to real world problems.
The class uses the Lean LaunchPad Methodology for rapid customer learning and product
development, first taught in the Stanford ENGR 245 - Lean LaunchPad course.
This Lean LaunchPad Methodology has national reach and scale. As the “Innovation
Corps”, it has been adopted by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of
Health, Department of Energy and elements of the Department of Defense, teaching
scientists and engineers how to commercialize their technologies. To date, 700 teams of
principal investigators have been taught by 70 instructors in 50 universities.
We intend to achieve similar results and impact with for this Hacking for Defense class.
Our goal is to prototype the class at Stanford and rapidly disseminate the syllabus to
other colleges and universities to help create a 21st
century “Tech ROTC.”

Why This Class?
Problem
Defense-relevant technologies increasingly originate in the commercial technology base,
underscoring the urgent requirement for the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish
more proactive and responsive mechanisms that identify and exploit these
“
dual-use
”

technology opportunities. Sharpening America
’
s technological edge and maintaining its
superiority requires adopting and integrating commercial technology into defense
systems more rapidly and efficiently than our opponents with access to similar
technologies. Defense research and development (R&D) and acquisition processes must
adapt to this emerging technological landscape and better harness available sources of
innovation potential.
However, incentives for bringing this needed innovation into the government with speed
and urgency are not currently aligned with the government acquisition, budgeting, and
requirements processes. While new threats appear in months or even weeks, the DOD
and IC Community acquisition processes are still measured in years.
Agencies that historically owned technology superiority and fielded cutting-edge
technologies are now finding that commercial solutions may be more advanced, or that
adversaries can create asymmetric responses by the time our solutions are deployed.
As a result, the DOD fails to acquire truly innovative technologies (much less paradigm-
changing technologies) in a timely fashion.
While DARPA and In-Q-Tel try to fill the need for speed, they were designed for a threat
environment that historically gave the DOD/IC years to respond. That’s no longer true.
We no longer have this kind of time. Our enemies have access to readily available dual-
use technologies and will employ them against our interests at home and abroad. Our
adversaries are rapidly creating asymmetric threats unconstrained by bureaucracy and

systemic friction – it is an urgent national security requirement for us to innovate even
quicker.
Today the primary conduits for bringing new technology to the government are still the
large and established defense prime contractors (e.g., Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon,
Leidos, Northrup Grumman, L3, General Dynamics, et al.) But most of these
contractors focus on fulfilling existing technology needs that can be profitable.
Elements of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community understand the
danger of this this lag time and are experimenting with alternatives to the traditional
acquisition process. (The Army’s Rapid Equipping Force was a war-time example of one
such successful program.) The Department of Defense has set up an innovation outpost
in Silicon Valley, (but unfortunately they’re currently thinking that it’s Silicon Valley
technology they should adopt, not its speed or agility.) Some agencies are writing 90-day
contracts for prototypes, others are starting their own incubators or running internal
Hackathons, or creating outposts in Silicon Valley. Some agencies have already adopted
the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps curriculum to foster rapid prototype development skills
among their staffs.
Solution
Hacking for Defense (H4D) is designed to provide students the opportunity to learn how
to work with the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) to better
address the nation’s emerging threats and security challenges. This network of classes will
provide a system that can develop prototypes that match DOD/IC users’ needs in weeks.
Further, by creating a national network of colleges and universities, the Hacking for
Defense program can scale to provide hundreds of solutions a year.
Agencies or Commands in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community may
provide follow-on funding to these student teams for further refinement and
development of prototypes.
In the existing Lean LaunchPad and I-Corps classes, student teams come to class with a
vision of a product or service they’d like to build. In this Hacking for Defense (H4D) class,
student teams may either select from an existing set of problems provided by the DoD/IC
community or introduce their own ideas for DoD/IC problems that need to be solved.
Although teams pick a problem to solve, Hacking for Defense is not a product incubator
for a specific technology solution. Instead, it provides teams with a deeper understanding
of selected problems and the host of potential technological solutions that might be
arrayed against them. Using the Lean LaunchPad Methodology the class focuses teams to:
1. Profoundly understand the problems/needs of government customers
2. Rapidly iterate technology solutions while searching for product-market fit

3. Understand all the stakeholders, deployment issues, costs, resources, and
ultimate mission value
4. Deliver minimum viable products that match customer needs in an extremely
short time
5. Produce a repeatable model that can be used to launch other potential
technology solutions

How Does This Class Work?
Hacking for Defense uses the same approach to teaching and learning proven successful
in Lean LaunchPad and I-Corps classes taught at universities across the country.
The class begins with teams of students who have selected a problem from the list of
topics proposed by groups within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence
Community.
The teams use the Mission Model Canvas (see Appendix D) to develop a set of initial
hypotheses about a solution to their problem. Over the weeks of the class, teams will
reformulate and iterate on these hypotheses through customer discovery and build
minimal viable prototypes (MVPs). Each team will be guided by two mentors, one from
the agency that proposed the problem and a second from the local community.
The cross-boundary mentor collaboration itself will prove valuable to the DOD and IC.
Ultimately this may be as important as the solutions derived by the students. Long-
lasting connections between effective mentors will be valuable to all parties long-term.
Outside of class, teams complete reading and learn about the elements of the Mission
and Capabilities Model Canvas through the video lectures in addition to weekly interviews
with at least 10 “customers”- military/government end users and stakeholders- and
conversations with their mentors. Each week in class the teams give 8 minute
presentations about what they learned, build and demo their latest minimal viable
prototypes, and get feedback from the instructors, mentors and their classmates. Each
team documents the details of its work on LaunchPad Central, a web-based software
program. This enables teams, instructors and mentors to have immediate access to the
progress of each team.
How Is This Document Organized?
The first section of this document is the Educator Guide. In this section we explain the
rationale for why we designed the class, and offer the details of how to teach this class.
The Educator Guide includes details of how to:
1. Solicit DOD Project Topics of Interest
2. Translate the submitted topics into actionable problems for the university
students and available ecosystem
3. Form Student Teams of Solution Providers
4. Assemble the Teaching Team
5. The Class Roadmap
6. Teaching Team Roles and Tools
Appendix A is the list of problem topics provided by the DOD/IC Community.
Appendix B are the Team Application forms.

Appendix C is the sample mentor weekly email.
Appendix D is description of the Mission & Capabilities Model Canvas.
Appendix E is a description of LaunchPad Central
Appendix F is the rationale for our “relentlessly direct” teaching style
Finally, in Appendix G we include a sample syllabus – the syllabus used when we first
taught the class as MS&E 297 at Stanford in Spring 2016

1. Soliciting DOD/IC Project Topics of Interest
Elements of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community have agreed to
provide a list of specific project topics of interest. Topics may come from Special
Operations Forces such as Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC), US Army Special Operations Command, Naval Special
Warfare Command (NSWC), or from other government agencies such as the National
Security Agency, Defense Innovation Unit (Experimental) (DIUX), the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency (NGA) or the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA).
Selecting Appropriate Class Problems
Out of the pool of DOD/IC problems, (see Appendix A) we select those where solutions
can have immediate national impact. We also look for solutions that could be dual-use
and attract private capital as well as DOD/IC support.
To do so our team translates DOD/IC topics into commercially recognizable terms and
provides additional context, such as storyboards and vignettes that would allow students,
faculty, local advisors and private capital investors to understand the potential value of
solving a proposed problem.
DOD/IC Topic Submission Guidelines
These topic descriptions are not detailed acquisition requirements. Nor are they broad
general technology requirements. They are all about solving a specific set of
customer/user/stakeholder problems.
Sponsors/Program managers need to help potential student teams assess what
customer/user/stakeholder problems are of interest and what expertise they believe the
teams need to solve them.
The goal for the students in the class is to get a deep enough understanding of the
customer problem to come up with a minimal viable product that the program sponsor
says, “Wow, let’s figure out how to get this deployed/used/acquired.”
Realistic problem selection is incredibly important. Although the problem presented may
be unclassified, the customer may intend for the application or implementation of the
solution to be classified. At a minimum, it may be Unclassified for Official Use Only.
Program managers/mentors should consider problems where the entire use case
(including the deployment) can be discussed with the teams.
In some cases, the DOD/IC sponsor may want to offer an unclassified analog to a problem
but not discuss the deployment or use details.

See the sample Problem Proposal below that an interested DOD/IC agency would submit.
No formal Memo of Understanding is needed (at least for the first class!) Our goal is to
keep it extremely simple.
DOD Hacking for Defense (H4D) - Problem Proposal (Sample)
Problem Title:
Background: 4-5 sentences providing a general description of the problem to be solved.
Why is this important?
Challenge: One sentence description of the challenge.
Boundaries: Used to define a box for students to operate in. Provide bullet comments:
• Describe technical thresholds that may be desirable (don’t write requirements)
• Environmental conditions to consider
• Technologies that might be relevant
• Other clarifying information
Do not exceed one page
The current problem set list is in Appendix A. The translation of government problems to
student topics is being done by the teaching team assisted by the Stanford University
Military Fellows and other local experts.
Brokered Interviews
In the IC Community cold calls are viewed with suspicion and not returned (and are
reported.) Therefore, the IC sponsor will agree to act as a “broker” for the interview
process via Video TeleConference (VTC). In some interviews VTC will not be available and
phone interviews will have to suffice.
Topic Visibility
Topics are posted on the class website 90 days before the class starts. Teams can form
around any one of the posted problems or may request to add their own problem to the
class.

Multiple Teams Per Topic
There may be projects that generate interest from multiple qualified student teams. If the
DOD/IC sponsor is interested, at the discretion of the faculty, up to two teams may work
on the same project.
DOD/IC Benefits
• All intellectual property developed during the class (code, hardware, concepts,
MVPs, prototypes, etc.) are open source – with the following caveats:
o Individual team members own what intellectual property (patents,
hardware, algorithms, etc.) they brought to class with them
o The university may have licensing claims on prior university sponsored
research
• Sponsoring agencies may offer teams or individuals follow-on activities/funding in
their facilities/incubators to deliver capabilities to their operators
DOD/IC Responsibilities
Each of the DOD/IC agency/organizations who sponsors a problem to the class has agreed
to provide:
• a detailed topic description and suggested team expertise to solve it
• a mentor that is the single point of contact for the team
• identify an “In-service champion” who will do something with the results?
Mentors from the sponsoring organizations commit to the following:
• Get agreement from their organization to provide student access to their customer
segments. These may include:
o Concept developers
o Requirement writers
o Buyers (Acquisition PM's)
o Users (the tactical folks)
• Pitch their topic (via Video TeleConference (VTC) is ok) for 10-minutes at two
prospective student info sessions
o This is not a requirements pitch but a compelling vignette about the problem
and its importance
• Participate in the team interview process
o Final team selection is made solely by the faculty
• Attend a 1-hour mentor onboarding and orientation session (via Video
TeleConference (VTC) or in-person.)
• Provide mentoring and customer access:
o Brief teams after they’ve been accepted to the class and help them talk to their
first 10 customers before class starts
o Watch the online video and become familiar with the Lean Startup methodology
o Mentor the teams via Video TeleConference (VTC) at least 1 hour/week

§ Provide a primary and secondary contact
o Provide access to a critical mass of users/stakeholders/partners for interviews
(100 when practical)
o Act as an “interview broker” to navigate the “no cold-calls” problem in the IC
Community
DOD/IC Support Needed for Hacking for Defense as a National Program
When the National Science Foundation turned Steve Blank’s Stanford Lean LaunchPad
class into the national I-Corps program, it did three things.
1. It provided financial support to universities that offered the class
2. It provided financial support for the teams taking the class
3. It outsourced the logistics of hiring instructors, training instructors, the
logistics/infrastructure needed to hold the classes to a 3rd
party
To scale Hacking for Defense nationally will require a DOD element to provide the
equivalent support:
• Financial support to universities that offer the class
• Financial support / incubator infrastructure for projects that the DOD/IC would like to
continue
• 3rd
party logistical support to:
• Curate and translate problems
• Coordinate the DOD/IC mentor to team relationships
• Hire and train instructors

2. Forming Student Teams of Solution Providers
Class Listing
We prototyped this class at Stanford as MS&E 297. It was listed as a graduate class in the
Engineering School in the Management Science & Engineering Department. Our course
description is below.
MS&E 297: “Hacking for Defense”: Solving National Security issues with the Lean
Launchpad
In a crisis, national security initiatives move at the speed of a startup yet in peacetime they
default to decades-long acquisition and procurement cycles. Startups operate with continual
speed and urgency 24/7. Over the last few years they’ve learned how to be not only fast, but
extremely efficient with resources and time using lean startup methodologies.
In this class student teams will take actual national security problems and learn how to apply
“Lean Startup” principles, ("business model canvas," "customer development," and "agile
engineering”) to discover and validate customer needs and to continually build iterative
prototypes to test whether they understood the problem and solution. Teams take a hands-on
approach requiring close engagement with actual military, Department of Defense and other
government agency end-users.
Team applications required in February. Limited enrollment. Course builds on concepts
introduced in MS&E 477.
2015-2016 Spring
• MS&E 297 | 4 units | Class # 47395 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | LEC
• 03/28/2016 - 06/01/2016 - with Blank, S. (PI); Byers, T. (PI); Felter, J. (PI)
• Instructors: Blank, S. (PI); Byers, T. (PI); Felter, J. (PI)
Admission to the Class
The class is open to all students; no military experience is required.
Admission to the class is by pre-formed teams of 4. (See team formation section below.)
There is a maximum of eight teams of four students per class.
Teams may have additional resources outside of class work on the project.
We found that having the students come in with an already-formed team accomplishes
three things:
• It saves weeks of class time. Students have met, gotten to know each other, have
brainstormed their idea, and are ready to hit the ground running.
• It eliminates many of the challenging team dynamics issues of learning which students
can’t work with each other. Most (though not all) of these issues get worked out pre-
class on their time, not the instructors'.

• Most importantly, we get to select student teams for their passion, interest, curiosity,
and the ability to learn on their own.
Team Formation: Brown Bag Lunches, Information Sessions/Mixers &
Office Hours
Beginning ten weeks before class starts, we sponsor two brown bag lunches and two
evening Information Sessions/Mixers, and Instructor Information Office Hours.
For the brown bag lunch, we schedule a lunch-time talk about the general topic of how
the Lean Methodology can provide solutions at speed to current defense needs. Our
teaching assistant schedules the classroom and promotes the event with posters all over
campus, emails to department lists, etc. Likewise, our team personally engages military
service members in the student body and other veterans within the university to elicit
them to encourage student and mentor participation.
For the Information Sessions/Mixer our teaching assistant organizes a 2-hour evening
session, and we provide pizza and refreshments. The information session is one hour and
the mixer is the second hour. The teaching team members introduce themselves and
provide a 30-minute overview of the class and details of the problems we are looking to
solve. We arrange for providers of the DOD problems to Video TeleConference (VTC) into
the class if they want to market their problem. We take questions from the potential
students.
After the information session – in the 1-hour mixer, we ask “Who’s looking for a team to
join?” We have those students introduce themselves (background and interests). The
teaching team then leaves the students to mix over Pizza and see if they can form teams.
After the information sessions, but before the team interviews, the teaching team offers
Instructor Information Office Hours. These are 15-minute office hour slots for teams who
want to bounce ideas off of an instructor or get a more detailed feel for the class.
Marketing the Class
We describe the class to students as, “Learn how to innovate at speed while helping make
the world a safer place.” Emphasis is that the world is at a critical time, real threats in
Paris, Syria, and that we can contribute to make it safer for everyone.
Team Application Form
Students apply as teams. They tell us about themselves and their team using the Team
Information, Mission Model Canvas” and competitive analysis Petal Diagram templates in
Appendix B.
Team Interviews
Teams who are interested apply online and admission is by team interview. The entire

teaching team (and the DOD/IC mentor for that team) interviews each team. Team
selection is based on:
• Team interest and commitment to the problem selected
• Team technical expertise/background to reasonably solve the problem
The teaching team interviews all teams, generally in 15 minute “speed dating” sprints.
We use a shared Google doc grading form similar to the one below as a useful way of
keeping track of each team’s candidacy.
Team Makeup and Roles
The posted problems will allow the four-person teams to decide the best makeup of their
teams. Most problems are technical in nature and will require teams that have at least 3
domain experts, likely with heavy computer science or other engineering backgrounds.
The teams will self-organize and establish individual roles on their own. We’ve found that
having the teaching team try to form teams creates zero team cohesion: “I didn’t do well
because you assigned me to people I didn’t like.”
Within teams there are no formal CEO/VPs, just the constant parsing and allocation of the
tasks that need to be done. By design, the teams need to figure out how to collaborate.
Admission
Teams are admitted on the basis of their match between the problem they selected, their
team composition and the teaching team’s judgment about their likelihood of successful
completion of the class objectives.
Mentor Support
Each team will be assigned two mentors:
• a DOD/IC community mentor as described above, who owns the proposed problem.
• an additional mentor from the local community that understands the problem and
customer
Many of the DOD/IC current program managers will be managing: Contractors,
Academics, Federal Labs Researchers and Small Businesses. One of the desired outcomes
of the program is to attract progressive program manager/mentors from the DOD/IC that
are not part of their current status quo. They will need to be a special breed for the H4D
effort. Building a community of these types of product managers will be an important
contribution of H4D.
Amount of Work
We remind students that this class is a simulation of what startups and entrepreneurship
are like in the real world. They’ll confront chaos, uncertainty, impossible deadlines in
insufficient time, and conflicting input.

As a result, the class requires a phenomenal amount of work by students, especially
compared to most other classes. Teams have reported up to 15 hours of work per student
per week. Getting out of the classroom is what the effort is about. If they can’t commit
the time to talk to customers, this class is not for them. Teams are expected to have
completed at least 10 in-person or Video TeleConference (VTC) interviews each week.
This class pushes many people past their comfort zone. But this is what startups are like
(and the class is just a small part of the startup experience). The pace and the uncertainty
pick up as the class proceeds.
Pre-class Work
As soon teams are admitted, and before class start, teams need to conference with their
DOD/IC mentor and:
• Begin to understand the types of customer (users, buyers, requirement writers, etc.)
• Schedule and interview 10 customer before class
• Map out the first hypotheses they want to test and develop and present their first
MVP on day one of the class
Intellectual Property / Open Source Policy
Sharing
We tell the students that one of the key elements of the Lean LaunchPad is that we get
smarter collectively. We learn from each other—from other teams in class as well as from
teams in previous classes.
This means that as part of the class, the teams will be sharing their Customer Discovery
journey: the narrative of how their business model evolved as they got out of the
building, the details of the customers they talked to and their Minimum Viable Products
(MVPs). At times they will learn by seeing how previous classes solved the same type of
problem by looking at their slides, notes, and blogs. They will also share their
presentations and Business Model Canvas, blogs, and slides with their peers and the
public.
Intellectual Property
All intellectual property developed during the class (code, hardware, concepts, MVPs,
prototypes, etc.) are open source – with the following caveats:
• Individual team members own what intellectual property (patents, hardware,
algorithms, etc.) they brought to class with them
• The university may have licensing claims on prior university sponsored research

3. Assembling the Teaching Team
With no more than 8 teams, a single instructor and a part-time teaching assistant can
teach this class. However, the optimal teaching team would have a minimum of:
• Two instructors
• A teaching assistant
• Two mentors per team (one DOD another local)
• Advisors
Faculty
On its surface, the class could be taught by anyone. The pedagogy of teaching the Lean
LaunchPad (Business Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) does
not appear overly complex, and with a flipped classroom the students seem to be doing
all the work. And on its surface, working with the government just seems to be another
market. All an instructor must do is critique and grade their weekly presentations.
However, when teaching this class, the quality and insights the instructors bring to the
critiques of the team’s weekly progress is the core of the class. If you’ve had startup (not
just general business) expertise, then the critiques you offer to your students draw from
the many painful lessons you’ve learned building businesses. If you haven’t had direct
startup experience, you can still do a fine job, just be aware that there may be some old
teaching habits to break. In addition, selling to the government and having a first hand
understanding of the needs of specific DOD and IC customers make the difference
between generic advice for a team versus targeted advice based on domain knowledge.
Having a member of the teaching team with domain knowledge of the government
customers (but with an appreciation of the Lean Methodology) is a huge asset for your
students.
In a perfect world, at least one of the instructors would be an adjunct who has taught the
Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class (or has attended the Lean LaunchPad Educators Course),
and if available, the other would be a local entrepreneur, angel investor or venture
capitalist who has experience with the DOD and IC. This allows teaching team critiques to
be based on specific pattern recognition skills that brings credibility to the teaching
team's comments.
Instructor's role
In class, the instructor's role is to:
• Ensure students have watched the online lectures and answer questions about the
online lecture subject matter.
• Critique the team presentations and offer guidance on Customer Discovery strategy
and tactics. We are relentlessly direct with the teams. See Appendix F.
• Grade the student presentations and share private comments with the rest of the
teaching team within LaunchPad Central.

Teaching Assistant
Given all the moving parts of the class, a teaching assistant keeps the trains running on
time. Here’s what they do:
Pre-class:
• Recruit team members by actively and aggressively publicizing the class
• Organize the mixers/information sessions
• Keep the list of research topics up to date
• Keep track of student applications and match them to DOD/IC topics
• Answer basic questions about the class and application process.
During Class:
• Manage and coordinate DOD/IC mentor/team relationships
• Manage and coordinate local mentor/team relationships
• Manage and coordinate instructor/team office hours
• Collect weekly team presentations and manage the order of presentation and timing
• Manage LaunchPad Central. This includes:
o The instructor grading sheet used by the teaching team for grading and real-time
collaboration for instructors.
o The student feedback grading sheet used by the students to offer feedback to
their peers. (Actually designed to keep students actively engaged in watching
the progress of other teams rather than reading their email.)
o The “Resource Hub” including the Office Hours signup sheet.
• Communicate in-class information to course participants
• Organize the weekly faculty after class “post mortem” meetings
See the separate 16-page Teaching Assistant Handbook for a detailed description of
TA’s roles and responsibilities
Mentors and Advisors
Mentors play an active role in weekly coaching of a specific team. (Advisors are on-call
resources for the entire class who have committed to respond to student emails/phone
calls within 24 hours, but do not have the time to mentor a specific team.)
Mentors are an extension of the teaching team responsible for the success or failure of a
team of four students. Each team has two mentors: the DOD/IC mentor who provided the
problem the team is working on and an additional mentor from the local community who
understands the DOD/IC problem and customer and/or potential of dual-use of the
product. The mentors role is to help his/her team test its business model hypotheses and
build matching Minimal Viable Products.

Military Liaisons
Where possible, currently serving members of the military are assigned to student teams
as Military Liaisons. These liaisons help student teams interact effectively with their
DOD/IC problem sponsors. The ideal Military Liaison is a mid to senior grade active duty
military officer with some expertise and/or background in the problem area their student
teams are addressing as well as a familiarity with the agency presenting the problem.
(see Appendix G in the Sample Syllabus for examples.)
Before class Military Liaison members are assigned to individual student teams and make
contact with the DOD/IC mentor for the problem their assigned student team(s) will be
addressing. The military liaison provides the problem sponsor context and goals for the
class and why it is important and a potential resource for the DOD/IC. These liaisons help
students build the rapport and relationships with the DOD/IC problem sponsors needed
for a productive interaction with the student teams.
During the class Military Liaisons help coordinate and facilitate communication between
student teams and their designated DOD/IC mentors as well as help ensure sufficient
access to end users and other stakeholders is available for interviews in support of the
customer discovery process. These liaisons are readily available sources of feedback and
insight on how to engage a busy DOD/IC “customer” most effectively as well as a resource
that can engage the DOD/IC mentors and other representatives effectively and with the
objectives of the class in mind.
Role of the DOD/IC mentors
Before class each member of the DOD/IC community who contributes a problem to the
class has agreed to be actively involved in the class by:
• Providing a detailed topic description and suggested team expertise to solve it
• Pitching their topic (via Video TeleConference (VTC) is ok) for 10-minutes at two
prospective student info sessions
o This is not a requirements pitch but a compelling vignette about the problem
and its importance
• Participating in the team interview process
o Final team selection is made solely by the faculty
• Attending a 1-hour mentor onboarding and orientation session (via Video
TeleConference (VTC) or in-person.)
• Provide access to a critical mass of users/stakeholders/partners for interviews (100
when practical)
• Act as an “interview broker” to navigate the “no cold-calls” problem in the IC
Community
During class the DOD/IC mentor is the gateway to Customer Discovery. Cold calling
DOD/IC for Customer Discovery is difficult. Most of the DOD/IC are trained not to accept
calls/solicitations from “random” people. Additionally, contact information is not often
publicly available and students can’t just show up on a base or government agency

unannounced and try to interview people. In this class, it is the Mentors that understand
the problem and know the customers, stakeholders and their organization and have
agreed to facilitate many of the interviews. They have agreed to:
• Provide mentoring and customer access:
o Brief teams after they’ve been accepted to the class and help them talk to their
first 10 customers before class starts
o Watch the online video and become familiar with the Lean Startup methodology
o Mentor the teams via Skype at least 1 hour/week
§ Provide a primary and secondary contact
o Provide access to 100 users/stakeholders who have the problem for interviews
§ 100 customer interviews are an aspirational goal we set for the
students – there may be some projects where the total number of
users/stakeholders are smaller than that
In the first few weeks, the DOD/IC mentor should rapidly help teams to:
• Gain a deep understanding of the problem through customer discovery
• Understand how the problem is being solved today (or not) through more
customer discovery
• Understand the solutions already tried and
• Provide continuous feedback and encouragement on the development of multiple
Minimal Viable Product iterations.
It is critical that the mentor avoids specifically telling students what to do and how to do
it. After week four, the DOD/IC mentors can start turning up the heat with increasingly
prescriptive suggestions.
Role of the Local Mentors
In this class the local mentor supplements and complements the DOD/IC mentor.
Optimally they add additional perspective about the overall business model, potential
dual-use of the product/service, potential commercial off-the-shelf solutions to the
problem, additional contacts in other branches of the DOD/IC community for customer
discovery. If your school has entrepreneurs who have served in the military or DOD/IC
community they’d also make great mentors to bridge the .edu and .mil worlds.
What mentors do week-to-week:
• Provide teams with tactical guidance every week (scheduled at the mentor
convenience):
• Meet with their team at least 1-hour a week (video Skype or in person)
• Rolodex help: “Why don’t you call x? Let me connect you.”
• Comment on the team's LaunchPad Central Customer Discovery progress
• Encourage and guide the weekly Minimal Viable Products
• Review the team's weekly presentation before they present.
• Respond to the teaching team’s critique of their team.
• Push their team to make 10 - 15 customer contacts/week.
• Stay current (or ahead) of the weekly lectures and readings in the syllabus

• Check in with the teaching team at classes 3 and 7 to discuss student progress.
If mentors can’t commit to the time required, have them consider being an advisor.
Mentor/Advisor Outreach
While we are recruiting students, we also look for local mentors. (The DOD/IC mentors
have been identified along with the topic problems they proposed.) We keep a
spreadsheet of possible mentors and advisors. We look for experienced local
entrepreneurs and investors who are willing to learn as much as they will teach.
In recruiting mentors, it is important to look for individuals who have significant
intellectual curiosity, relevant business experience, and have a generous spirit, and who
see the value in the Mission Canvas and Customer Discovery. The right mentor will
understand by the end of the class that a Customer Discovery narrative and the
Mission/Capabilities Canvas are important tools for building early-stage ventures aimed
at solving National Security problems while also building a viable commercial business.
It is important to set expectations for mentor involvement up front. Successful mentor
engagement is at minimum an hour a week and typically 2-3 hours per week throughout
the course. Ideally the teams share their weekly presentations with their mentor the day
or evening before the class and respond to their feedback. After the class, teams share
with their mentor the results of that presentation and their plan for the week ahead. In
addition to watching the weekly video lectures and staying current (or ahead) on the
readings in the syllabus, the mentors will also want to track and comment on their team’s
progress periodically in LaunchPad Central. (See details below.)
Advisors
Advisors have the same credentials as mentors, but cannot commitment the hour+ a
week to a specific team. They’ve agreed to act as a pooled resource for all teams and will
respond to an email within 24 hours. Teams can use them as sources for customer
discovery contacts, domain specific questions and questions about the business model.
Mentor/Advisor Weekly Email
After each class, we send mentors a weekly email summarizing what their teams should
be doing. The emails are accompanied by a short set of PowerPoint slides summarizing
the week’s learning for the class. (The weekly mentor update slides can be found here1
.)
See Appendix C for an example of an email that would be sent out right after class 2:
1
http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/tagged/syllabus

4. The Class Roadmap
Pre-class Work
As soon as the teams are admitted, before class starts, they need to conference with their
DOD/IC mentor and:
• Begin to understand the types of customer (users, buyers, requirement writers, etc.)
• Schedule and interview 10 customer before class
• Map out the first hypotheses they want to test and develop and present their first
MVP on day one of the class
Weekly Class Flow
Each week’s class is organized around students’ hypothesis-testing their business model
assumptions and MVPs outside the classroom.
Figure 5. Organization of a canonical class of up to 8 teams.
The flow of the class starts with teams preparing the latest MVP to show customers. The
MVP is used to test a specific Mission Model hypothesis. The team then gets out of the
building with their MVP and talks to 10-15 customers validating or invalidating the
hypotheses they are testing. As they talk to customers during the week they are updating
their customer discovery narrative in LaunchPad Central. They gather all the information
they learned during the week, meet with their DOD/IC mentor, have office hours and

prepare a 10 minute in-class presentation of what they learned. After class they read the
course text to prepare them for the next weeks mission model hypothesis testing. They
accomplish this by:
• Doing homework: Assigned reading and video lectures
• Talking to their DOD/IC mentor
• Engaging with their local mentor
• Completing Customer Discovery with 10-15 customers/stakeholders/partners
• Updating their Minimal Viable Product
• Capturing their customer discovery progress in LaunchPad Central and updating their
Mission Model Canvas
• Taking what they learned and assembling a 10-minute Lessons Learned presentation.
• Attending mandatory office hours
• Listening to comments and suggestions from the teaching team on the lessons
learned.
In class Activities:
• Team presentations and instructor critiques
• Instructors lecture on DOD/IC specific advice on one of the 9 mission model building
blocks to help prepare you for next week’s Discovery
Minimum Viable Product Deliverables
Teams are accountable for the following deliverables:
• Teams building a physical product must show a costed bill of materials and a
prototype, which could be a rough mock-up
• Teams building a Web product need to build the site, create demand, and have
customers using it. See2
Course Length: 10-Week Quarter or 12-Week Semester
The Hacking for Defense Course can be offered in a block week (5 days), in a quarter (10
weeks) or in a semester (12 weeks). Each of these iterations have proven to be successful
formats, For the sake of convenience and cogency, the balance of this instructor's guide
provides detailed guidance for the quarter (10 weeks) format; however, we encourage
you to experiment and adopt it to suit your requirements.
10- and 12-Week Course Logistics
• Brown-bag lunches and Info sessions/mixers prior to the class for team formation.
• Immediately after teams are admitted to class (weeks before class start) teams begin
brainstorming solution development and come to class with a first MVP
• The class is offered once a week. Given the experiential nature of the class, it is
sometimes listed as a “Lab.”
2
http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-lean-launchpad-edition/

• Each class is 3 hours long.
• There are eight weekly lectures, plus a 9th
and if needed, a 10th
week for the final
team presentations.
• The class is easily configurable from anywhere from 8-12 weeks by allowing extra
weeks after Lecture 3, Customer Segments, for the teams to further explore
product/market fit.
• Three workshops are offered outside of normal class hours for Customer Discovery
practice, details on customer acquisition and activation, and presentation skills
training. If time permits, they may be offered as normal classes.
Course Summary
Week Lecture Topic
10 weeks prior Brown-bag lunch
#1
Innovation at speed on tough, big national security
problems. Why and how.
9 weeks prior Brown-bag lunch
#2
Innovation at speed on tough, big national security
problems. Why and how
8 weeks prior Info session/Mixer Course Q/A, students form teams/mix with DOD/IC
7 weeks prior Info session/Mixer Course Q/A, students form teams/ mix with DOD/IC
6 weeks prior Interview Interview top 24 teams – down-select to 8
5 weeks prior Admit teams Offer 8 teams slots, wait-list 2 teams
5 weeks prior Begin MVP
development
Teams start working on problem solutions. Present 1st
in MVP day 1 of class
N days prior Workshop 1 Intro to working with the DOD/IC
Week 1 Lecture 1 Intro, Mission Model, Customer Development
Week 1 Workshop 2 Customer Discovery practice for DOD/IC, What’s a
Minimal Viable Product
Week 2 Lecture 2 Value Proposition
Week 3 Lecture 3 Customer Segments
Week 4 Lecture 4 Deployment
Week 4 Workshop 3 Requirements/ Acquisition
Week 5 Lecture 5 Getting Buy-In / Creating an Insurgency
Week 6 Lecture 6 Mission Value
Week 7 Lecture 7 Activities/Resources
Week 8 Lecture 8 Partners and Costs
Week 8 Workshop 3 Presentation Skills Training
Week 9 Lessons Learned Lessons Learned Presentations

5. Teaching Team Roles and Tools
Team Teaching
In class, the instructor's role is to:
• Ensure students have watched the online lectures and answer questions about the
online lecture subject matter.
• Critique the team presentations and offer guidance on Customer Discovery strategy
and tactics.
• Grade the student presentations and share private comments with the rest of the
teaching team within LaunchPad Central.
Outside class, the instructor's role is to:
• Every week, review and comment on each team's Customer Discovery narrative.
• Every week, hold mandatory office hours for every team.
Best Teaching Practices
• Use critiques of specific teams to make a general point for the entire class.
• We use a philosophy of being “relentlessly direct” with the teams.
o To some this sounds harsh, but it is the best way to get effective learning in
the shortest amount of time. See Appendix F
• Don’t offer students prescriptive advice. Instead, try to teach students to see the
patterns without giving them answers.
• Adjuncts offering startup “war stories” should have a specific lesson for the class.
• Remember that everything you hear from students are hypotheses—guesses—that
you want them to turn into facts. “That’s an interesting theory. What experiments can
you quickly and inexpensively conduct to prove or disprove this theory?”
• The goal is to get students to extract learning from the customer interactions.
• Numbers of customer visits matter. The larger the quantity, the greater the likelihood
for meaningful “pattern recognition” to emerge, and the more extracted insights that
can be gained as a result.
Lean Process
• Focus on discovery + MVPs + Acquisition/activation + Validation (teams find it easy
to do discovery, and have found it difficult to build prototypes and validate them).
• Make it clear from the beginning of class that MVPs and validation are required.
• Ensure someone on each team knows how to build MVPs, design and run ads, and
make sales presentations.
Lectures/Flipped Classroom
Lectures take the students through each of the Business Model Canvas components while
teaching them the basics of Customer Development. Lectures come in two parts; first, the

basic lectures have been put online at Udacity or through LaunchPad Central to “flip the
classroom” and are assigned as homework. Second, instructors follow up those basic
lectures translating the canonical business model canvas into the mission model canvas
which better maps into DOD/IC problems. (See Appendix x)
However, we have found that unless you call students out on whether they watched the
lectures in the first class, most students will not watch them.
Note that a flipped classroom still requires class discussion time to integrate the lectures.
Reserve at least 15 minutes of instructor-led discussion at the beginning of the class.
Reserve another 15 minutes at the end of each class for time to conduct the “looking
ahead to next week” discussion, tying both lessons to the teams’ Canvases.
Figure 5. Online Lecture
LaunchPad Central
One of the problems with managing multiple teams is that it is difficult to keep track of
their progress while maintaining a high level of instructor-to-team engagement. Without
some way of keeping detailed track of all teams’ progress during the week, your in-class
critiques would only be based on their 10-minute presentations.
To solve this problem, we insist that each team blog their Customer Discovery progress.
We have them write a narrative each week of customers they’ve visited, hypotheses
they’ve tested, results they’ve found, photos or videos of their meetings, and changes in
their Business Model Canvas. We have them do it all online. Various online solutions can

be cobbled together (an online “mashup” of blogging tools), however we favor using an
integrated special purpose-built tool called LaunchPad Central.3
(See Appendix X for
LaunchPad Central screen shots.)
(In the DOD environment we do not post identifying information of Agency employees or
military members is posted and shared.)
Using LaunchPad Central software, we have successfully managed numerous
simultaneous classes, each with as many as 27 teams.
This platform allows the teaching team to comment on each team’s posts and follow their
progress between class sessions. Having asynchronous access to the teams’ progress
makes it easier for faculty teams and mentors to provide valuable input at whatever time
of the day or night best serves their interests and availability.
This means that during the time between each class session, the teaching team needs to
go online and read and comment on each of the teams. You must do this each week.
Then, when each team presents, your comments and critiques will be informed by their
progress.
Office Hours
In addition to reviewing each of the teams' progress via the LaunchPad Central software,
the teaching team has mandatory office hours for teams every week. Office hours help to
provide course corrections and uncover the inevitable team dynamics issues.
• Instructors reserve an hour a week to meet with 3 teams
• The office hours do not have to be done in person. Video TeleConference, etc. are
acceptable alternatives that can include the entire team (from more than one
location).
• Office hours ensure that teams don’t get too far “off course.” Indications that an early
intervention may be required include: no clue about what a value proposition OR
customer segment looks like; impractical sense of what can be done in the semester in
terms of creating an MVP or prototype, early warnings of team dysfunction, etc.
• Schedule office hours at least two weeks in advance, (our TAs use a shared Google
doc visible to all) so that the teaching team can prepare specifically for that team’s
session.
• Teams are expected to post a summary of the Office Hours on their LaunchPad
Central narrative. These should be reviewed and commented on to be sure that you
and the teams were actually in the same meeting! (You’d be surprised …)
3
http://www.launchpadcentral.com

Textbooks and Online Video Lectures
There are four required textbooks for this course:
• Business Model Generation: Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010
• Value Proposition Design: Osterwalder and Pigneur 2014
• The Startup Owner’s Manual: Blank and Dorf, 2012
• Talking to Humans: Constable & Rimalovski
• Online lectures can be found here:
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/nsfllp/CourseRev/1
• All the Lectures and their subtitles can be download for free at:
https://www.udacity.com/wiki/ep245/downloads
• Lecture slides can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/tagged/syllabus
• Student presentation examples: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/
• Customer Discovery tutorials: http://venturewell.org/i-corps/llpvideos/
Grading
The course is team-based and 85% of the grade will come from evaluation of team
progress and the final “lessons learned” presentation. The grading criteria are as follows:
10% Individual participation: consists of four parts: a) quality of the written feedback of
students’ peer-to-peer comments provided throughout the semester, during class
presentations in LaunchPad Central software, b) attendance at each class, c) timely
viewing of ALL course video videos viewed (those that fall far behind will be asked to
leave the class and return when they are caught up) and d) a grade from their
fellow team members at the end of the course (in the form of a private email sent
by each team member to the teaching team assessing the relative participation of
other team members’ performance and productivity throughout the semester).
40% Out-of-the-building customer discovery progress: as measured each week by a)
quality of weekly blog write-ups and b) canvas updates and presentations. All team
members are expected to perform interviews and contribute to the weekly blog
entries.
25% The team weekly “lessons learned” presentation: Team members must:
1) State how many interviews were conducted that week (include on cover slide).
2) Present detail on what the team did that week, including changes to canvas.
3) Follow the assigned topics to be covered each week as outlined in the syllabus.
Team members will be called on randomly to present their team’s findings that week.
25% The teams’ final Lessons Learned presentation and video

Guidelines for Team Presentations
Each team is expected to speak to 10 or more customers every week. In every cohort,
there is almost always one team that, in either week one or week two, has only
interviewed 4 or 5 customers. When that happens, we ask them to sit down and won’t let
them present. The reasoning is that they could not have learned very much, and we don’t
want them to waste the class’s time presenting “faith-based” slides in an “evidence-
based” class. The 10-minute weekly team presentations are summaries of each team’s
findings during that week.
Each week, teams are expected to have an updated version of their Mission Model
Canvas. Their customer discovery and MVP should focus on the topic introduced at the
end of the previous class. This is true regardless of whether they’ve pivoted and are re-
exploring topics from earlier lectures. In the case of a pivot (which can be indicative of
successful customer discovery), teams have to work doubly hard to cover earlier class
topics, update and amend their canvas assumptions as required, and touch on current
class topics in their weekly presentation.
You want all team members to be familiar with their entire presentation. One way of
doing so is to have the TA randomly select which team member presents.
Weekly Lessons Learned Presentation Format
Slide 1 Title slide
• Team name, team members/roles
• Number of customers spoken to this week
• Total number spoken to
• Three sentence description what the team does and why I should care
• Market Size (TAM, SAM, TM, and did it change this week)
Slide 2 MVP
• Show us your MVP of the week
• Tell us what hypothesis the MVP is testing, what data you expected and what you
actually received.
Slide 3: Customer Discovery
• Tell us about your 10 customer interviews.
Hypothesis: Here’s What we Thought
Experiments: Here’s What we Did
Results: Here’s What we Found
Action: Here’s What we Are Going to Do Next

Slide 4: Mission Model Canvas
• Updated Mission Model Canvas with week-to-week changes shown in red
• Multi-sided markets shown in different colors
Slide 5: Diagram (as appropriate)
• Diagram what you learned this week (e.g., customer workflow, payment flows,
distribution channel pictorial)
Feedback from the teaching team during oral presentations is where the most learning
occurs. Due to the pace and tempo of the course, participants must be held accountable
for the material for each specific class.
Instructor Pre-Course Preparation
Objective: Have a basic understanding of the Lean LaunchPad class:
a. Business Model Canvas
b. Mission/Capabilities Model Canvas
c. Customer Development
Read the Harvard Business Review Article:
https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?c=25903&i=25905&cs=f85
785d3580feb87e2bce1535af10c2f
Review the Course Video Lectures:
• Online Lectures: https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245
You can download the videos here:
https://www.udacity.com/wiki/ep245/downloads
• Pay close attention to the chapter “Secret Notes for Instructors/Coaches” at the end
Review the “Teachable Moments” Videos:
https://vimeo.com/groups/190717
Review the “How to do Customer Discovery” Videos:
http://venturewell.org/i-corps/llpvideos/
Pre-Planning Customer Discovery
• Pre-Planning Pt. 1 (4:55)

Customer Discovery Interviews 
• Interviews Pt. 1 (5:40)
• Interviews Pt. 2 (3:49)
• Asking the Right Question (2:37)
Outside the Building
• Death by Demo 1 (2:18)
• Death by Demo 2 (1:45)
• Assuming You Know what the customer wants (1:56)
• Understanding the Customer Problem (the wrong way) (1:42)
• Understanding the Problem (the right way) (3:22)
• Customers Lie (2:37)4
• The Distracted Customer (3:12)
• Engaging the Customer (3:37)
• Customer Empathy (2:25)
• The User, the Buyer & the Saboteur (2:24)
• Multi-Person Interview (2:03)
• B-to-B to C (2:15)
• Existing vs. New Markets (5:29)
• Interviews in Public (2:11)
Back in the Building
• Extracting Insight from Data (2:59)
• Getting the MVP Right (3:34)
• Pay Attention to Outliers (2:16)
• The “Other 85%” (2:32)
Get Hands-on with LaunchPad Central
Instructor Reading Material:
Textbooks:
• Business Model Generation (BMG) Osterwalder and Pigneur
• Value Proposition Design Osterwalder and Pigneur
• The Startup Owner’s Manual (SOM) Blank and Dorf
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Blank
• Talking to Humans: Constable & Rimalovski
Download the Value Proposition Canvas here:
4
http://vimeo.com/groups/204136/videos/76176674

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/value_proposition_canvas.pdf
Read about the Value Proposition canvas here:
http://businessmodelalchemist.com/blog/2012/08/achieve-product-market-fit-with-our-
brand-new-value-proposition-designer.html
Review the lectures here: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/tagged/syllabus/2
Read "Customer Development Manifesto" (Chapter 2, SOM)
Look at previous student presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank
Become familiar with the Startup Tools page: http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-
entrepreneurs/
Review the Lean LaunchPad class background:
• http://steveblank.com/category/lean-launchpad/
• http://steveblank.com/2010/12/07/the-lean-launchpad-–-teaching-
entrepreneurship-as-a-management-science/
• http://steveblank.com/2011/05/10/the-lean-launchpad-at-stanford-–-the-final-
presentations/
• http://steveblank.com/2012/02/16/who-dares-wins-the-2nd-annual-
international-business-model-competition/

Appendix A – DOD/IC Accepted Problem Topics
Navy Special Warfare Group 3 (NSWG3)
Wearable Sensors and Apps for Divers
Background: Navy divers work in extreme conditions, performing various underwater
tasks ranging from underwater ship repair, underwater salvage and special
operations/special warfare type diving. Because their area of operations are so varied,
they can be required to utilize any type of diving equipment for use in any depth or
temperature in any part of the world. Certain diving qualification allows these divers to
live and work at extreme depths for days or weeks at a time, a discipline known as
saturation diving.
Despite the extreme range of diving tasks, divers don’t have the means to monitor their
physiological status and gain early warning of the onset of hypothermia or other physical
conditions that can lead to severe consequences if the diver is removed from the water.
A study published by the United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit reviewed the long
term health impact on the US Navy diving population.[2]
The divers surveyed dived an
average of 18 years out of their average 24 active duty years.[2]
Sixty percent of the divers
surveyed were receiving disability compensation.[2]
One in seven of the divers had
experienced neurologic symptoms of decompression sickness with 41% of the divers one
or more of the nine diving injuries surveyed.[2]
Seven percent of the surveyed divers had
undergone a joint replacement.[2]
Eighty six percent of the divers rated their health as
"Excellent, Very Good, or Good".[2]
When compared to the general population, the divers
showed better mental health but poorer physical health.[2]
Challenge: Provide a wearable sensor system and Apps that will allow Divers to monitor
their own physiological conditions while underwater
Boundaries/Considerations:
• Consider operating depths of 60 to 200 feet and operating times from 2 – 4 hours
without recharging.
• Consider sensor reporting that includes body core temperature, max psi achieved
during ascent and descent, blood pressure, pulse. Geo-location, operation with no
backlight (vibration alarm), oxygen left in tank are all desirable data points
• Communication between divers using speech to text/whiteboard applications
• Location of display and readability underwater (cannot create a hazard to the diver)
• Methods of data transmission and cyber implications. Potential to transmit data
between divers up to 1000’ away is desirable
Sponsor POC: LT Brian Ferguson, NSWG3,
DIUX POC: CPO Jameson Darby, JAMESON.DARBY@navy.mil

Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA)
Virtual Advice and Assistance Toolkit
Background: The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, was
established in 2006 to counter the growing threat of IEDs being experienced in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Earlier this year, JIEDDO was realigned under the Office of the
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The new agency is
now called Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency, or JIDA.
When the United States had a large and active presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, JIEDDO
had more accurate and up-to-date information about the types of IEDs being used there
and the frequency and location of their use. Now that the large U.S. presence is gone,
that flow of information has diminished. The agency is looking for ways to restart that
flow of accurate and timely information so they can work better to defeat those threats.
For example, in a situation where U.S. Soldiers are not allowed to leave their installation
in Iraq, but where they might want to be able to help Iraqi Security Forces disarm and
exploit an IED they have found, a tablet computing device or augmented reality glasses
could be issued to those Iraqi security forces. Those Iraqi security forces could then take
that device out to the location of the IED they have found, and consult with American
counterparts in real time over the network to disarm it, and to document key information
about what they have found.
Challenge: Provide tools that will enable Virtual Advice and Assistance to foreign national
military and law enforcement agencies to help them counter improvised threats
Boundaries/Considerations:
• Automating translation of the text entered to English in 4 or so languages. Like
Google does.
• Able to down-link from sensors (UAVs, Commercial Satellites)
• Ability to share data across multiple classifications and domains
• Quick access to subject matter expertise (Explosive Ordinance Disposal, Combat
Engineers, medical, etc...)
• Access to network via cell, Wi-Fi, SATCOM, etc...
• Cross-functional apps that will work on any cell phone OS or platform.
• Virtual training and material assistance apps
POC: Tim Noonan, JIDA J8, timothy.f.noonan2.civ@mail.mil

15th
Operations Support Squadron
From Cybernetic to Organic: Organizing to enhance networks,
adaptability, and resiliency.
Background: How can an organization create novel emergent behaviors while also
growing the specialty skills of its sub-organizations? Critical to modern war is the ability
to rapidly communicate, share information and ideas among every member of an
organization. Operations Support Squadrons are formally organized into specialized and
rigid sub-organizations to provide a variety of support functions to a base’s flying
organizations. Specialty divisions like Intelligence, Weather, Airfield operations, Formal
Training, and Aircrew Life Support each have a critical, highly skilled role. But the
Squadron should be more than the sum of its parts. Organization charts have meaning,
because they tell a person their place in an organization and how they can communicate
with the rest of the organization. We need a structure that shows every member their
valued place in the organization and their ability to communicate freely with any other
member in the squadron.
Challenge: Develop an organic, team, or network centered structure that enhances the
squadron’s communication, adaptability, resilience, and specialty skills.
Boundaries:
• Desirable Technical Thresholds: This challenge is focused on organizational change,
technology can help but should not be a primary focus.
• Environmental conditions: High information volumes, only non-flying squadron in a
flying Group
• Technologies that might be relevant: Social media, mobile computing, mesh
networks, secure data sharing (encryption, VPN, etc.)
• Other clarifying information: Many of the functions performed by our current sub-
organzations are mandated by Higher Headquarters, the Department of Defense, and
law. These are primarily information gathering functions as a part of a cybernetic
feedback system designed to identify and correct deviations from established
standards. It is not within the scope of this challenge to change any of those
requirements. Instead we would like to fold those required functions into a structure
that makes us agile and resilient in the face of future challenges.
Point of Contact: Capt Kurt Degerlund USAF AMC 21 AS/DOK kurt.degerlund@us.af.mil
Senior Military advisor will be Lt. Col Marc Greene (CC'd) the commander of the 15th
Operations Support Squadron at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief Mobile and Web based App

Background:
There is a need for a mobile and internet app that permits coordination, collaboration,
and information sharing between International (e.g. U.N.), Federal (i.e. DoD, FEMA, US
AID), State, local, and civilian populations. These apps would accelerate the fusion of
information preceding a disaster, while also enabling better disaster response after a
disaster has occurred.
Challenge: International, Federal (inclusive of DoD, FEMA, US AID), State, Local, and tribal
organizations lack one common information sharing environment. This makes
coordination and collaboration across these entities difficult, there by delaying an
effective response during a disaster. This results in an increase to the loss of life (both
from a pre and post disaster perspective). Additionally, the civilian populace lacks a single
information environment for reporting damage and assistance requirements during a
disaster recovery. This hinders the response from first responders, since damage/rescue
requirements may be fist reported via social media (twitter, facebook, etc)
Boundaries:
• Inform/ alert civilian populations (those that download the mobile app) to imminent
disaster. Should include recommended preparation steps (kit, evacuate, etc).
• Must permit information sharing if cell tower infrastructure is damaged. Likely
include mesh technology features.
• Should aggregate other social media inputs (e.g. twitter feeds), as they relate to
required assistance from first responders.
• Provides a common information sharing environment (augmented by inputs from the
civilian populations) from which international, federal, state, local first responders can
coordinate. This improves information sharing issues caused by VHF radio
interoperability issues across multiple jurisdictions.
• Synchronize both mobile and web based applications.
• Consider requirements of U.N, DoD, FEMA, US AID, State, Local, Tribal responders.
• Operate in ad hoc (e.g. mesh network) and bandwidth limited environments.
Point of Contact: TBD

Commander U.S. Navy 7th
Fleet C7F – ISR Network
Distributed, Disposable, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance
Background:
There are 50-70 ships, 140 aircraft and 40,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel assigned
to 7th Fleet’s Area of Responsibility (AOR) that encompasses more than 48 million square
miles from the Kuril Islands in the north to the Antarctic in the south, and from the
International Date Line to the India-Pakistan border.
Maintaining maritime domain awareness of submarine, surface ship, and aircraft activity
throughout 7th
Fleet’s vast Area of Responsibility is a daunting challenge even during
peacetime. The global trend towards the development of Anti-Access and Area Denial
(A2/AD) tactics further complicates this mission. It becomes a cost/benefit decision about
whether or not to risk a collection platform within the denied area to gain battlespace
awareness. Developing a distributed and disposable air, land, and sea sensor strategy is a
key element to operating in a denied environment.
Challenge: Develop a strategy for procuring and employing distributed, low-cost,
disposable, secure, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance sensors throughout the
7th Fleet Area of Responsibility.
Boundaries:
• Sensors must be low cost, disposable, and capable of being produced in large
enough numbers to cover key 7th Fleet areas of interest.
• Sensor array must be capable of persistent operation in the maritime environment
(salt, weather, humidity).
• Strategy should include employment, emplacement, dispersal, and replenishment
in an A2/AD environment.
• Consider environmental and safety factors including hazards to navigation and
wildlife.
• Consider both manned and unmanned systems.
• Consider, air, sea, undersea, and ground systems.
• Strategy should include the problem of how to connect, collect, find meaning
from, and distribute the information in an A2/AD environment.
• Include a concept of physical security and cyber-security for these sensors to
prevent the use of the sensor network against the host network. (Ex. Tamper
resistant, volatile memory, security coded).
• There are three specific problems that would make good demos
o Building low cost sensors (Some Navy "disposable" sensors cost $25k each)
o Connecting sensors and getting data back to a central repository
o Machine assisted method of finding meaning in the data.

POC: LT Jason Knudson Jason.Knudson@fe.navy.mil; CAPT Hertel, Director of the C7F
Commander's Initiatives Group will be the head of the coordinating office
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Joint Improvised
Threat Defeat Agency
Open Source Analytics for Indications and Warnings (I&W). Sponsor –
(JIDA)

Appendix B – Team Application forms
Figure 1. Lean LaunchPad Application: Team Information
Figure 2. Lean LaunchPad Application: Business Mission Model Information

Using the Mission Model Canvas as an application form gets the teams thinking long
before the class starts about some of the fundamental questions regarding their team
project, such as “What is a mission model? How is it different from a business model?
What product or service am I offering to solve the problem? Who are my customers?”
We set the pace and tempo of the class by having the teams talk to 10
customers/stakeholders before the start of the class. On the first day of the class teams
present their updated Mission Model Canvas based on what they learned before class
started. This way teams hit the ground running.
If the product/service is a replacement or enhancement of an existing product/service we
ask the teams to draw a “petal diagram” of the existing offerings. This places their
product/service in the center, and the existing solutions as leaves on the sides. The goal is
to have them articulate the current offerings and be able to explain how they are better,
faster, cheaper, new capabilities, etc.
Figure 3. Lean LaunchPad Application: Petal Diagram of Existing Offerings
StartupEcosystem
Corporate
HigherEducation
A
dultLearning/Skills
Institutions

Appendix C – Sample Weekly Email Updates to Mentors
Hi Mentors,
Welcome to the kick-off of the Lean Launchpad! We hope you've all had a chance to meet your
teams and are looking forward to a fantastic quarter.
This week the teams are doing discovery on Value Proposition. Please watch Online lectures
lectures
Lesson 2: Value Proposition and Lesson 3: Customer Segments (in preparation for next week).
Your role this week is to offer your team a critique on LaunchPad Central and chat in person or
via Video TeleConference to offer them your advice/counsel and wisdom.
I've attached two documents to this email:
1) A cheat-sheet of the responsibilities/best practices for mentors.
2) A short deck (6 slides) that summarizes teaching objectives and common student errors. As
a reminder, teams need to be focusing on the right half of the canvas focusing on understanding
their value proposition, whether they have a multi-sided market, the archetypes of each of the
segments and whether they have product-market fit.
All of these Mentor Update slides will be posted on LaunchPad Central in the Resource Hub
section. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks for all your help,
Bill

Appendix D – Business Model and Value Proposition Canvas,
Mission Model Canvas
This course uses a modified version of Alexander Osterwalder Business Model Canvas
(and text) we call the Mission Model Canvas.
The Business Model canvas represents the activities a company needs to perform to
provide value to its customers and revenue and profit to itself. It draws these activities in
a diagram of nine boxes, summarizing the company’s product/service, customers,
channels, demand creation, revenue models, partners, resources, activities, and cost
structure.
Unlike a business plan where everything written is assumed to be a fact, in the business
model canvas we assume that everything is an untested hypotheses that needs to be
tested. When teams first draft their initial business model hypotheses, their canvas
begins to fill up, looking like this:
In addition to using the Business
Model Canvas as a static snapshot of
the business at a single moment,
Customer Development (the process
we use to test these hypotheses)—
and this class—extends the canvas
and uses it as a “scorecard” to track
progress week by week as the teams
search for a repeatable, scalable
Business Model.

Every week, the teams update their Canvas to reflect any pivots or iterations, highlighting
in red the changes from the last week.
Then, after the team agrees to
the business model changes,
they integrate them into what
becomes the new Canvas for
the week (the accepted
changes in red are then shown
in black). During the next week,
any new changes are again
shown in red. The process
repeats each week, with new
changes showing up in red.
By the end of the class, teams
will have at least eight
Canvases. When viewed one
after another, they show
something never captured before: the entrepreneurial process in motion.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
The Business Model Canvas as a Weekly Scorecard

Hacking for Defense Educators guide and Syllabus

Hacking for Defense Educators guide and Syllabus

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Similaire à Hacking for Defense Educators guide and Syllabus

Similaire à Hacking for Defense Educators guide and Syllabus (20)

Plus de Stanford University

Plus de Stanford University (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Hacking for Defense Educators guide and Syllabus