The Entrepreneurial State Quotes

“Although there is much talk about small firms creating jobs, and increasingly a focus of policymakers, this is mainly a myth.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“The State cannot and should not bow down easily to interest groups who approach it to seek handouts, rents and unnecessary privileges like tax cuts. It should seek instead for those interest groups to work dynamically with it in its search for growth and technological change.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“In fact, there is not a single key technology behind the iPhone that has not been State-funded.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“…since its founding fathers, the United States has always been torn between two traditions, the activist policies of Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) and Thomas Jefferson’s (1743–1826) maxim that ‘the government that governs least, governs best’. With time and usual American pragmatism, this rivalry has been resolved by putting the Jeffersonians in charge of the rhetoric and the Hamiltonians in charge of policy. Erik Reinert (2007, 23)”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“During a recent visit to the United States, French President François Mitterrand stopped to tour California’s Silicon Valley, where he hoped to learn more about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive that gave birth to so many companies there. Over lunch, Mitterrand listened as Thomas Perkins, a partner in the venture capital fund that started Genentech Inc., extolled the virtues of the risk-taking investors who finance the entrepreneurs. Perkins was cut off by Stanford University Professor Paul Berg, who won a Nobel Prize for work in genetic engineering. He asked, ‘Where were you guys in the ’50s and ’60s when all the funding had to be done in the basic science? Most of the discoveries that have fuelled [the industry] were created back then.’ Henderson and Schrage, in the Washington Post (1984)”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“In 2012, China announced its plan to produce 1,000 GWs of wind power by 2050. That would be approximately equal to replacing the entire existing US electric infrastructure with wind turbines. Are the United States and Europe still able to dream so big? It appears not. In many countries, the State is asked to take a back seat and simply ‘subsidize’ or incentivize investments for the private sector. We thus fail to build visions for the future similar to those that two decades ago resulted in the mass diffusion of the Internet.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“Creating a symbiotic (more mutualistic) public-private innovation ecosystem thus requires new methods, metrics and indicators to evaluate public investments and their results. Without the right tools for evaluating investments, governments have a hard time knowing when they are merely operating in existing spaces and when they are making things happen that would not have happened otherwise. The result: investments that are too narrow, constrained by the prevailing path-dependent, techno-economic paradigm. A better way of evaluating a given investment would be to consider the different types of ‘spillovers’, including the creation of new skills and capabilities, and whether it led to the creation of new technologies, sectors and markets.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“While Steve Jobs was no doubt an inspiring genius worthy of praise, the fact that the iPhone/iPad empire was built on these State-funded technologies provides a far more accurate tale of technological and economic change than what is offered by mainstream discussions. Given the critical role of the State in enabling companies like Apple, it is especially curious that the debate surrounding Apple’s tax avoidance has tended to overlook this fact. Apple must pay tax not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the ultimate example of a company that requires the public purse to be large and risk-loving enough to continue making the investments that entrepreneurs like Jobs will later capitalize on (Mazzucato 2013b).”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

“iPhone sea inteligente y no estúpido debe su financiación a la investigación, tanto básica como aplicada, financiada por el Estado. Esto, por supuesto, no significa que Steve Jobs y su equipo no fuesen cruciales para el éxito de Apple, pero ignorar el lado «público» de la historia impedirá que nazcan las Apple del futuro.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, El estado emprendedor (ECONOMÍA)