National Security and Diplomacy: What’s Entrepreneurship Have To Do With It?

Terrorists today live on the Internet and they are all early adopters. They do not need an office in Silicon Valley to figure out what’s out there. They are experts in leveraging Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies and are able to collaborate on various platforms. Targeting, assessments, technology, recipes, and tactics all flow at the speed of a lean startup. They can crowdsource designs, find components through eBay, fund through PayPal, train using virtual worlds, and refine tactics, techniques, and procedures using massive on-line gaming. In short, our new adversaries can acquire and deploy disruptive technology at a speed that to us looks like a blur. This is due to many reasons including: little legacy organizational baggage, no government overhead, some of the best software talent in the world, cheap manpower costs, and ultimately no fear of failure. The time is now for the United States and its allies to harness its own entrepreneurial response to a changing national security and diplomacy environment.

Presenter(s)

Join Colonel (ret.) Peter Newell of National Defense University, Colonel (ret.) Joe Felter of Stanford University and Professor Tom Byers of Stanford University, as they share their current experiences in prototyping courses at Stanford University and launching a non-profit called Hacking 4 Defense Incorporated (H4Di). H4Di purpose is to assist any university in creating their own programs and courses to solve challenging national security and diplomacy problems using lean startup and other entrepreneurship methods.