Designing for Defense is a semester-long course at leading United States universities that provides United States Department of Defense (DoD) leaders with the opportunity to collaborate with talented student teams to develop innovative solutions to their most pressing defensive national security problems. This course is run in collaboration with many U.S. national security organizations that connect university students with impactful DoD problems.

In D4D courses, interdisciplinary student teams are provided with real-world national security problems sourced from DoD and governmental agencies such as NASA. Then, student teams are instructed in, and apply, Lean Startup principles in order to iteratively develop and test potential solutions. By the end of the course, student teams will have conducted at least 100 stakeholder interviews and developed a “minimally viable product,” MVP, that addresses the needs of their DoD problem sponsor.

For students, D4D represents an unparalleled opportunity to work on real-world national security problems in close collaboration with DoD personnel and agencies. For problem sponsors, involvement in D4D is a force multiplier for their toughest problems. By the end of the course, sponsors will be provided with a MVP that aims to address their needs in addition to receiving significant new, creative, outside thinking on their problem topic.

Check out the Example Problems page on the site to learn more about the types of problems we tackle in the class and what the final solution for our sponsors looks like!