Mariana Mazzucato and the Myth That Innovation Belongs to the Few
They kept telling the same story.
That innovation comes from lone geniuses working late nights in garages.
From bold entrepreneurs risking everything while governments stand in the way.
From private visionaries who move fast, while the public sector slows progress down.
It was a story repeated so often that it hardened into common sense.
Mariana Mazzucato knew it was incomplete.
Born in 1968 and educated across Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Mazzucato entered the field of economics at a moment when one belief dominated nearly every policy conversation: the private sector innovates, the public sector regulates, and progress happens when governments stay out of the way.
The story was clean. Convenient. And wrong.
Instead of accepting it, Mariana began asking questions that made people uncomfortable.
Who funded the internet?
Who paid for GPS?
Who took the first real risks on touchscreen technology, voice recognition, and the pharmaceutical breakthroughs behind modern medicine?
The answer, again and again, was not venture capital.
It was not heroic entrepreneurs acting alone.
It was the state.
Behind nearly every breakthrough celebrated as a triumph of private enterprise, she found the same hidden pattern: years of high-risk public investment, long timelines with no guaranteed payoff, countless failures absorbed quietly, and only later—once success was visible—profits claimed loudly by private firms.
Governments had been acting like entrepreneurs all along.
They just never got the credit.
Mariana gave this reality a name: The Entrepreneurial State.
Her research demonstrated that the most transformative innovations did not emerge because markets demanded them, but because governments were willing to invest where markets would not. Space exploration. Medical research. Clean energy. Digital infrastructure.
These were not safe bets.
They were missions.
She showed that the state does not merely correct market failures after the fact. It actively creates markets. It funds basic research with no immediate commercial application. It builds the technological and institutional foundations upon which entire industries later stand.
Without public investment, there would be no Silicon Valley as we know it.
No biotech revolution.
No modern digital economy.
This argument unsettled powerful interests.
Because it challenged a deeply ingrained myth: that public spending is inherently inefficient, that governments should always be small, and that innovation belongs exclusively to corporations.
Mariana was not arguing against business.
She was arguing for honesty.
If public money takes the biggest risks, then public value should help shape the rewards. Yet again and again, she observed the same imbalance: taxpayers fund breakthroughs, risks are socialised, and profits are privatised. Governments act boldly in moments of crisis—bank collapses, pandemics, wars—but retreat into timidity during periods of stability.
Why, she asked, does economic policy focus so heavily on fixing problems after they appear, instead of setting ambitious directions in advance?
Her answer was deceptively simple.
Economies need missions.
Just as the Apollo program mobilised talent, technology, and capital toward the shared goal of landing a human on the moon, modern societies can organise around missions such as tackling climate change, improving public health, or building sustainable and inclusive growth.
Not vague aspirations.
Not abstract targets.
Clear, measurable goals that align innovation with public purpose.
What if climate change were treated as a moonshot rather than a regulatory inconvenience?
What if innovation were measured by social value, not quarterly profit?
What if governments acted with confidence instead of apology?
These ideas did not remain academic.
Mariana Mazzucato became an adviser to governments and institutions around the world—from Europe to Latin America, from national finance ministries to global organisations. She helped policymakers rethink economic strategy not as damage control, but as direction-setting.
Gradually, the language began to change.
“Mission-driven policy” entered mainstream economic debate.
Public investment was reframed as value creation, not waste.
The role of the state was reconsidered—not as a passive referee, but as an active shaper of markets.
Critics accused her of romanticising government.
She responded with evidence.
Innovation, she argued, had never been clean or linear. It was collective, uncertain, and deeply collaborative. Public and private sectors were always intertwined. The story of the lone entrepreneurial hero was the exception, not the rule.
And clinging to that myth was holding societies back.
Mariana did not claim that governments should replace markets.
She argued that markets need purpose.
That value is created together.
That risk deserves recognition.
That the future does not emerge accidentally—it is built deliberately.
Her work reframed how nations think about growth. Not as something that happens to them, but something they can shape. Not as a race for profit alone, but as a shared project of ambition, coordination, and courage.
She reminded the world of something it had quietly forgotten.
Every smartphone.
Every satellite.
Every life-saving drug.
Stands on a foundation laid by public investment and political bravery.
If societies want to solve problems as vast as climate collapse, technological inequality, or fragile health systems, they will need that courage again. They will need governments willing to take risks before success is visible—and citizens willing to demand that public value guides innovation.
Mariana Mazzucato did not invent innovation.
She exposed its true origins.
And in doing so, she gave governments permission to stop acting small in a world that desperately needs them to think big.
