Hacking for Defense® (H4D) is an undergraduate and graduate level university course sponsored by the Department of Defense. This program brings together engineering, business, and public policy students to apply entrepreneurial approaches and tools to DoD sponsored problems at over 40 universities around the United States.

Students in Hacking for Defense engage in mission driven entrepreneurship and use the Lean LaunchPad methodology to work on a government sponsored problems over the course of the semester. To learn more about the discoveries, innovations and companies that emerge from each semester of Hacking for Defense, please explore our Student Success Story page below.

Spring 2020 Semester

The Spring 2020 semester of Hacking for Defense was unlike any other. With the switch to virtual learning due to the global pandemic, students and teachers were faced with unprecedented challenges in their academic and personal lives. Despite the switch to a virtual course, the flipped classroom model of Hacking for Defense and the resiliency of the H4D community led to an overall successful semester.

This semester was the largest cohort of H4D students to date. Hacking for Defense was taught at 18 universities around the United States with 303 students in 77 different teams. This group collectively conducted an estimated 4770 beneficiary discovery interviews throughout the course of the semester. This diligent work by H4D students led to solution adoption and company formation for several student teams.

To learn more about our featured student teams from the Spring 2020 semester, explore the team profiles featured below.