When Vision Meets Investment: Why Technology Thrives

As I sat through Charleston Digital’s State of the Tech Dinner, listening to the keynote speaker, a familiar idea crept into my mind, almost like a prelude to his speech. It was something I had encountered during my Future of Technology class at SCAD, where our professor highlighted the significance of government and military involvement in driving some of the world’s most transformative inventions. GPS, the internet, modern computing - these technologies didn’t just happen; they became reality because institutions were willing to invest in them, pursue them, and see them through. Listening to Justin Fanelli speak about AI, dual-use technologies, and public-private collaboration, I realized that lesson was alive today: innovation only reaches its potential when it’s supported, coordinated, and executed effectively.

We like to talk about innovation as though it’s a personality trait - something startups “have” and institutions “lack.” But listening to Justin Fanelli, CTO of the U.S. Department of the Navy, it became clear that the problem isn’t imagination. It’s endurance. We generate remarkable technology, then lose interest when it’s time to integrate it, scale it, and measure whether it actually works.

Fanelli’s framing was blunt in the best way. The world is more volatile than it used to be, and stability won’t come from maintaining aging systems or polishing legacy processes. Security, economic prosperity, and delivery are now inseparable. If public institutions fail to modernize, the consequences don’t stay neatly inside government - they spill into the economy, the workforce, healthcare, and everyday life.

What struck me most was the shift in language - from spending to value, from inputs to outcomes. For decades, success has been measured by whether money was spent “correctly,” not whether it produced anything better. That mindset has quietly trained systems to prioritize safety over effectiveness. Spending a budget became an achievement. Improving results became optional.

But value is harder to fake.

Measuring outcomes forces uncomfortable questions: What did this replace? What got better? What no longer makes sense to keep? And perhaps most threatening of all - what are we willing to turn off so we can reinvest in something better?

Another idea that stayed with me was how quickly old boundaries are dissolving. Defense, healthcare, transportation, and commercial tech are no longer separate conversations. AI, sensors, autonomy, robotics, and data systems don’t care what sector they’re in. Innovation today moves horizontally, not vertically. That reality makes collaboration less of a nice-to-have and more of a survival skill.

There was also a refreshing honesty about unlearning. Experience, we’re told, is an asset - but only if it doesn’t calcify into inertia. The longer someone has operated inside a system, the harder it can be to imagine alternatives. That isn’t a failure of intelligence; it’s a human tendency. But moments like this one don’t reward comfort. They reward adaptability.

What I walked away thinking is that we don’t have an innovation shortage - we have a commitment gap. We celebrate breakthroughs, then hesitate when it’s time to adopt them at scale. We admire disruption but protect the systems it threatens. We praise efficiency, but measure success in ways that guarantee inefficiency.

What I left thinking about most was ‘responsibility’. This isn’t a moment where innovation can be outsourced to “the market” or deferred to the next generation. The tools exist. The talent exists. The stakes are clear. What’s required now is alignment - between public and private sectors, between investment and outcomes, between ambition and execution.

Winning now isn’t about contracts or headlines. It’s about outcomes that are so clearly better than the baseline that no one wants to go back. It’s about building systems that work not because they’re familiar, but because they’re effective.

This moment feels less like a technological turning point and more like a moral one. We can continue to admire innovation from a distance, or we can commit to doing the hard work of adopting it responsibly and decisively. History suggests that the inventions that shape everyday life don’t come from comfort - they come from urgency, intention, and collective effort.

The future doesn’t need another idea. It needs follow-through.

Listen to Justin Fanelli’s keynote at Charleston Digital’s annual State of the Tech dinner HERE.