Page 47: of Marine Technology Magazine (September 2020)

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Undergraduate electrical engineering major Seth Lit- man writes code for a sensor unit used to measure wa- ter level. Litman is on the CCCIA-sponsored team, which received mentorship from marine robotics company

Blue Robotics.

Inspiring Mission-Driven Entrepreneurs

Hacking for the Environment: Oceans and Hacking 4

Oceans are the latest in a series of mission-driven entrepre- neurship courses that have students across the country think- ing differently about how to solve real-world problems.

The course series launched in 2016 at Stanford University with Hacking for Defense (H4D) – the idea of Steve Blank, creator of the Lean Startup movement; and (Ret) Army Colo- nels Joe Felter and Peter Newell, who had identi? ed a need for national security innovation at speed. They hypothesized that graduate students could use Lean Startup principles to solve some of the nation’s toughest national security and in- telligence community challenges at speed. Four years and 40 universities later, H4D has helped create a national se- curity innovation pipeline and given hundreds of university students a new platform for performing national service.

At the same time, creating “Hacking for” variants focused on social challenges, applying the same tools and processes to local municipal issues like the need for affordable housing and access to mass transit (Hacking for Cities), social issues (Hacking4Impact) and State Department issues (Hacking for

Diplomacy).

The classes use Steve Blank’s experiential Lean Launch- www.marinetechnologynews.com

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