Welcome to the Common Mission Project UK
Solving problems at speed has never been more urgent than now. We need an ecosystem of mission-driven entrepreneurs able to quickly adopt and adapt modern innovation tools and processes to address the many critical challenges we face as a result of COVID-19.
Daily conversations across industry, academia and government in month six of this pandemic are presenting new challenges - at times on an hourly basis - and are appearing qualitatively different from month one. There is no better time than now to pull together across academia, industry and government to solve COVID19 problem sets.
At the Common Mission Project, we are building such a network. Our mission to solve critical national security, civil, and social challenges of our time has a sharper focus in recent weeks. Our challenge is two fold: 1) to immediately engage our talented UK postgraduate students to help end the pandemic and 2) to find new ways to support our universities, their students and faculty deliver H4MoD in this new reality while maintaining world class standards of education.
We want you to join us.
Opportunities in Crisis
The Common Mission Project works to educate, connect, inspire and advocate for mission-driven entrepreneurs. Our flagship programme, “Hacking for MoD” (H4MoD) launched in 2019, builds on the success and impact of Hacking for Defense®(H4D) in the U.S. H4MoD is an accredited Masters module where student teams learn and apply Lean Start-up methods to solve some of the toughest national security and defence problems facing the Ministry of Defence. The student teams work alongside a government problem sponsor, validating the problem and devising solutions in weeks instead of months or yers.
Since launching in the UK, we have run four H4MoD modules at King’s College London (Defence Studies Department in partnership with the UK Defence Academy, and the Department of War Studies) and Imperial College London’s Institute for Security Science and Technology. We have trained over 50 university faculty, government problem sponsors, and industry mentors. Our goal this year is to be in four new universities by December 2020, making a total of seven UK universities working on the country’s toughest national security and defence challenges. In 2021 we aim to double that number. In four years we want an H4MoD module running in twenty four universities across the UK, giving postgraduate students across the country the opportunity to engage hands-on with real-world problems.
H4D and H4MoD student teams pivot on average two times over the 10 weeks of the course. Their discovery gained from conducting 10 interviews per week over these 10 weeks means they are constantly testing and modifying their hypotheses around the sponsor’s problem, forcing them to pivot on initial solutions. The Common Mission Project is no different to our student teams. We are finding ways to continue delivering a high standard of education and learning in the toughest circumstances we have faced yet as an organisation, a country, and simply as citizens living in a pandemic.
This year we are pivoting to deliver H4MoD virtually so students can continue to have the opportunity to work on real-world problems in a fast-paced environment as a part of their MA degree. Our second pivot is to start sourcing problems related to the COVID19 and the MoD, giving students the opportunity to work on problems they are now experiencing.
In addition we are are delivering our Educator and Problem Sponsor courses virtually and virtually sourcing problems across defence and security.
You can come to this site at any time to learn about what we are doing and where H4MoD courses are running. You can use this site to let us know you would like to get involved and how, or simply to have a conversation.
Next week the H4MoD student team Ox Intel from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London will be sharing their experience of H4MoD on this blog and why they decided to form a dual-use company as a result.