NSIN consists of a portfolio of programs designed to build a defense innovation workforce that creates ventures relevant to both national security and high-potential civilian applications. These programs are organized in three broad categories: national service, collaboration, and acceleration. NSIN's Collaboration portfolio connects innovators inside and outside of the Department of Defense to solve national security problems. Hacking for Defense, a university-sponsored class that teaches students to work with the DoD to better address national security challenges, was first taught at
Stanford University by
Steve Blank in the spring of 2016. One team from the pilot class,
Capella Space, secured a combination of DoD and venture capital funding and was scheduled to send the first U.S. commercial synthetic radar satellite into orbit in 2017. Since then, Hacking for Defense has expanded to the
University of Virginia,
UC San Diego,
Georgetown University,
University of Pittsburgh,
James Madison University, the
University of Southern Mississippi, the
University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the University of Colorado Boulder. MD5 Hack is a series of hackathons focusing on areas of shared civil-military interest. NSIN's inaugural hackathon took place in October 2016 in
Brooklyn, New York, where over 100 hackers worked to solve humanitarian assistance and disaster relief challenges faced by military personnel and first responders. NSIN Boot Camp also falls under the Collaboration portfolio. Lastly, NSIN promotes collaborative innovation virtually through an online platform, MD5.net, which includes modules for specific innovation communities, such as Marine Makers. NSIN's Acceleration portfolio provides funding, prototyping, and infrastructure resources needed to translate high potential concepts into minimum viable products or prototypes. NSIN also sponsors FedTech, an accelerator program that pairs entrepreneurs with technologies from federal labs to conduct customer discovery and business model development. The NSIN Proof of Concept Center (PoCC) at the
University of Southern Mississippi provides digital design and manufacturing resources in support of distributed prototyping. The PoCC supports the Commandant of the Marine Corps Innovation Challenges by building hardware prototypes of concepts
crowdsourced from the active duty Marine community. Other Acceleration portfolio programs include the Defense Innovation Proving Ground, an effort led by the
West Virginia University that furnishes DoD research and development infrastructure to startups developing technologies relevant to national security, and the Deep Tech Studio, an Innovator-in-Residence program at
New York University that applies technology from DoD laboratories to real-world defense and commercial applications. == Recognition ==