U.S. Navy Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli said the Navy and the broader Defense Department (DOD) need to shift their focus from inventing new technologies to adopting and scaling existing capabilities that already solve operational problems.
Speaking at the Digital Government Institute’s 930gov conference on July 28 in Washington, D.C., Fanelli said both invention and scaling are important, but argued the department needs to improve its ability to adopt technologies that already exist.
“If you’re solving problems, they’re both important,” Fanelli said. “Scaling is a little bit closer to the people that we’re trying to serve, and so I make the argument that we need to get better at scaling … let’s celebrate the adoption piece, not the invention piece.”
Fanelli said the shift is increasingly important because the private sector often develops new technologies faster than the government does. Instead of immediately building a new capability, Fanelli said the department now encourages personnel to first determine whether a suitable solution already exists.
“We wanted folks – before they start building – to survey the land to see if there isn’t something better either internally or externally,” he said.
“We can be innovative by adapting,” he said. “Instead of innovating, let’s see what’s out there.”
Fanelli said that philosophy is reflected in the Navy’s Innovation Adoption Kit (IAK), which is designed to help the service identify, adopt, and field existing technologies more quickly.
The Innovation Adoption Kit aims to accelerate the transition of pilot programs into full implementation while reducing fragmented network development. The framework emphasizes shared engineering solutions that can scale across the service and enable broader divestment of redundant systems.
Fanelli said the Navy aims to move technologies through those stages in approximately 18 months to two years, compared with acquisition cycles that previously lasted as long as 17 years when the department attempted to build capabilities internally.
The CTO said the Navy uses an investment horizons model to move capabilities from scouting and pilot programs to scaling, enterprise deployment, and ultimately divestment of legacy systems. The model consists of Horizon 3 for scouting and pilot programs, Horizon 2 for scaling emerging capabilities, Horizon 1 for fully deployed enterprise services, and Horizon 0 for retiring outdated systems.
Fanelli said the framework relies on outcome-driven metrics to determine whether existing technologies outperform current systems.
Fanelli said the framework also supports operationalizing artificial intelligence by moving beyond experimentation to disciplined adoption. He said the approach emphasizes scaling technologies that demonstrate value while retiring systems that no longer meet the department’s needs.
Under the Trump administration, the DOD has been rebranded as the War Department.