Virginia Economic Review

Sixty years after The Jetsons promised a future of personal-sized spacecraft that moved people and things safely through crowded skies, that vision, or something like it, is ever closer — thanks to a Virginia company that’s a global leader in building digital air highways.

Shannon Kellogg is vice president of public policy at Amazon, where he leads the company’s public policy efforts in support of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Prem Natarajan, Ph.D., is chief scientist and head of enterprise AI at Fairfax County-based Capital One Financial Corporation, where he manages technology strategy, architecture, and development for the company’s enterprise data, machine learning, and analytics initiatives.

Karen Dahut is the CEO of Google Public Sector (GPS), where she works to bring Google technology to solve complex problems for U.S. public sector institutions at the local, state, and federal levels.

With 30 military bases, Virginia is among the states with the highest share of active duty troops relative to state residents.

The global aerospace industry is reinventing itself, with innovation spanning materials, engineering, and a more expansive vision for how we take to the skies. Virginia sits at the heart of this transformation as a breeding ground for ingenuity.

On 462 acres in Albemarle County, a plot of land along U.S. Route 29 adjacent to a federal intelligence hotspot is the latest addition to a growing cluster of industries coming to define the Charlottesville area.

Backed by monumental funding deals, a peaking business profile, and a strong entrepreneurial undercurrent, Virginia is building an accessible, collaborative, and truly thriving innovation ecosystem far and wide across the Commonwealth.

Imagine an apartment building. The lobby entrance, residential door, and parking deck are all accessed and opened via a phone app. The resident takes their laptop to the pool and it automatically connects with Wi-Fi.

Artificial Intelligence may seem like a new technology, but CarMax has been using it for years. The Goochland County-based company is the country’s largest seller of used cars.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has existed as a business venture since its inception in 1607, when the Virginia Company of London formed a joint-stock company to bring profits to shareholders and establish an English colony in the New World.

Virginia’s higher education system, consistently ranked as one of the best in the country, is well established as an elite talent incubator. But the Commonwealth’s universities, both public and private, also serve as a launching pad for startup companies.

Paul's Fan Company in Buchanan County was founded in 1958 as a small machine shop servicing the coal mining industry. It evolved over the years to focus on improved mine ventilation, producing turnkey industrial ventilation solutions for companies.

Tom Walker is the founder and CEO of DroneUp, a provider of drone delivery and flight services that has operated out of Virginia Beach since its founding in 2016.

Maj. Gen. Ted Mercer is the new CEO and executive director of Virginia Space, the owner and operator of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), collocated at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

COVID-19 has underscored the value of businesses embracing digital technologies in the healthcare space — from telehealth and remote patient monitoring to artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive analytics and diagnostic insights.

In recent years, the increased amount of available data — 64.2 zettabytes (equal to 1 trillion gigabytes) were created globally in 2020, compared to 2 zettabytes in 2010, according to Statista — and ways to analyze and use it have escalated the demand for data science professionals to fill data analyst, business intelligence engineer, and other roles.

E-commerce became the lifeblood of retailers and business-to-business (B2B) suppliers in 2020, yet the innovation that grew out of this need has disrupted industry norms forever. Research from the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) and McKinsey & Co.