Avascent joins Georgetown University’s Hacking for Defense as Corporate Partner
WASHINGTON, DC – Avascent, a strategy and management consultancy serving government-driven markets, is pleased to announce a corporate partnership with Georgetown University’s new Walsh School of Foreign Service Security Studies program, Hacking for Defense.
Hacking for Defense, or H4D, is a battle-tested, problem-solving method created at Stanford by Peter Newell, former head of the Arm’s Rapid Equipping Force; retired U.S. Army Special Forces Col. Joe Felter; and Steve Blank, creator of the Lean Startup movement.
H4D connects the Silicon Valley mindset with islands of innovation inside the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence community. Students work with DOD and intelligence sponsors, using Lean Startup techniques and Blank’s Lean LaunchPad curriculum to address real-world national security problems. Avascent is a H4D Georgetown corporate partner, with Avascent employees acting as mentors to provide students their experience in market expertise.
“Hacking for Defense brings to together graduate students from all of Georgetown University’s school for an entrepreneurial approach to solving national security challenges,” said Avascent President Steve Irwin. “We are proud to be a part of this innovative course developing these solutions.”
The class began Jan. 11, 2017. Among the challenges students are looking to solve:
- how to use Augmented Reality to identify threat individuals in crowds;
- how to aggregate, index and analyze large amounts of social media data to identify probable hotspots of social unrest in dense urban environments;
- how to detect commercially available drones in order to gain situational awareness of imminent, aerial based threats; and
- how to send data directly into SIPRNet without the use of air-gapping.
To find out more about Hacking for Defense at Georgetown, visit: hacking4defensegu.com.
