Mission Economy Quotes

“[A mission-oriented economy] means asking what kind of markets we want, rather than what problem in the market needs to be fixed.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“We must create more effective interfaces with innovations across the whole of society; rethink how policies are designed; change how intellectual property regimes are governed; and use R& D to distribute intelligence across academia, government, business and civil society. This means restoring public purpose in policies so that they are aimed at creating tangible benefits for citizens and setting goals that matter to people–driven by public-interest considerations rather than profit.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Better understanding the organizational structures that have encouraged problem-solving, risk-taking and horizontal collaborations is thus key to understanding the wave of future radical change.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Innovation and the commercialization of ideas do not happen because you want them to: they happen along the way to solving bigger problems. Apollo was an example of what can be done if the ambition is inspiring and concrete”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Kennedy was clear that the Apollo project would cost a lot of money – and it did. And while he and NASA had to constantly defend the use of the budget, in the end the pressure and urgency to ‘beat the Russians’ made the money come through. Indeed, the urgency to win is why money is always available for wartime missions – whether in the world wars or Vietnam or Iraq. Money seems to be created for this purpose. There is no reason why a ‘whatever it takes’ mentality cannot be used for social problems. Yet the conventional approach is to assume that budgets are fixed, and so if money is spent in one area, it will be at the expense of another area. For example, if you want new energy infrastructure, you can’t have new hospitals as well. But what if budgets were based on outcomes to be reached, as they were for the moon landing and in wars? What if the first question is not ‘Can we afford it?’ but ‘What do we really want to do? And how do we create the resources required to realize the mission?”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Most finance goes back into finance, insurance and real estate rather than into productive uses. The acronym for this is FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate)”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Applying mission-oriented thinking in our times requires not just adaptation but also institutional innovations that create new markets and reshape the existing ones. And, importantly, it also requires citizen participation”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Nelson asked why our innovation systems have achieved such difficult feats as landing a man on the moon, yet continue to be so terribly disorganized and technologically unsavvy in dealing with the earthly issues of poverty, illiteracy and the persistence of ghettos and slums.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“But scientific progress, he wrote, almost always comes from trying to apply new knowledge to solve problems: ‘significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Stuhlinger asked the nun first to consider the story of a benign and much-loved count who lived in Germany 400 years ago.18 The count was always distributing his riches to the poor. But he did more than redistribute; he created. The count funded the scientific activities of a strange local man who worked in a small laboratory grinding lenses from glass, and then mounting the lenses in tubes and creating small gadgets. The count was criticized for wasting money on the craftsman when the needs of the hungry were so much greater. And yet, explained Stuhlinger, it was precisely such experiments that later paved the way for the invention of the microscope, which proved one of the most useful devices for fighting disease, poverty and hunger:”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“The successes of organizations that take risks and are directed at large goals are often unpredictable. Innovation itself is often characterized by unpredictable spillovers: the search for one thing leads to the discovery of another – unexpected technological benefits from R&D that can also produce wider managerial, social and economic benefits. Viagra, for example, was initially intended to treat heart problems and then was found to have another application. Innovation is fuelled best when serendipity is allowed, so that multiple paths are pursued, bringing advances in unknown areas. Embracing that uncertainty and serendipity is key for any entrepreneurial organization, whether in the public or private sphere. And as the story below illustrates, such serendipity in technological innovation can also bring great societal benefits.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“The concept can be defined as seeing the design of the whole rather than that of the parts. It is by nature interdisciplinary – a vital quality for NASA. ‘It requires you to really understand all of the forces that are brought to bear on a particular system and you’ve got to take account of “whatever” or else the system won’t work the way it’s supposed to,’ Mueller said.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Si quieres construir un barco, no animes a la gente a recoger madera y no les asignes tareas y trabajos, enséñales mejor a desear la infinita inmensidad del mar. Atribuido”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Misión economía: Una guía para cambiar el capitalismo

“Lo cual significa que los impuestos pueden utilizarse para recompensar más la creación de valor que la extracción de valor, y dirigir la creación de valor hacia la construcción de una economía que sea más inclusiva y sostenible.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Misión economía: Una guía para cambiar el capitalismo

“Pero la DARPA funciona en tiempos de paz. Hace poco, por ejemplo, financió las primeras fases de I+D para dos compañías farmacéuticas, Moderna Inc. y Inovio Pharmaceutical Inc., cuyo fin era crear vacunas de ADN y ARN; tecnologías que muchos científicos e inversores consideraban especulativas y muy arriesgadas.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Misión economía: Una guía para cambiar el capitalismo

“A partir de la década de 1980, una mentalidad de aversión al riesgo ha provocado que los empleados públicos teman hacer cualquier cosa que no sea facilitar el trabajo al sector privado.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Misión economía: Una guía para cambiar el capitalismo

“The wrong question is: how much money is there and what can we do with it? The right question is: what needs doing and how can we structure budgets to meet those goals?”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“But they do highlight the need to resurrect ambition and vision in our everyday policymaking. This cannot just be about bold statements. We have to believe in the public sector and invest in its core capabilities, including the ability to interact with other value creators in society, and design contracts that work in the public interest. We must create more effective interfaces with innovations across the whole of society; rethink how policies are designed; change how intellectual property regimes are governed; and use R&D to distribute intelligence across academia, government, business and civil society. This means restoring public purpose in policies so that they are aimed at creating tangible benefits for citizens and setting goals that matter to people – driven by public-interest considerations rather than profit.5”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“In business studies, value is understood as being created inside the company by bringing together managerial expertise, strategic thinking and a dynamic (changing with circumstances) division of labour between workers.3 All this ignores the massive role of government in creating value, and taking risk in the process. In The Entrepreneurial State I argued that Silicon Valley itself is an outcome of such high-risk investments by the state, willing to take risks in the early stages of development of high-risk technologies which the private sector usually shies away from.4 This is the case with the investments that led to the internet, where a critical role was played by DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the US Department of Defense – and also by CERN in Europe with its invention of the World Wide Web. Indeed, not only the internet but nearly every other technology that makes our smart products smart was funded by public actors, such as GPS (funded by the US Navy), Siri (also funded by DARPA) and touch-screen display (funded initially by the CIA). It is also true of the high-risk, early-stage investments made in the pharmaceutical industry by public actors like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – without which most blockbuster drugs would not have been developed. And the renewable energy industry has been greatly aided by investments made by public banks like the European Investment Bank or the KfW in Germany, with private finance often too risk-averse and focused on short-term returns.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“Many public services were also outsourced. While PFI was largely about building and running infrastructure, outsourcing was mainly about handing services over to the private sector to manage, notably IT. HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), DVLA (the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency), the NHS and local authorities awarded enormous IT contracts to external suppliers. Public services, including rubbish collection, school meals, building maintenance, prisons and even ambulance and probation services, were placed in the hands of private providers, often by local authorities: at its peak in 2012–13, the value of outsourcing contracts awarded by the latter reached £708 million.19 Since then, however, the value of local-government outsourced contracts has steadily fallen. The trend is similar for central-government IT outsourcing. Public organizations have increasingly found that outsourcing has not delivered the quality and reliability of services they had expected and has often not been good value for money either.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“The ideas in this book have been inspired by many. But it is probably significant that the previous chapter, looking at new theory, cites so many women scholars who have put life at the centre of the economy, not the economy at the centre of life: Hannah Arendt’s work on the public life, vita activa; Elinor Ostrom’s on creating community via the commons; Kate Raworth’s on the construction of a circular economy which minimizes waste; Stephanie Kelton’s on the power of long-run finance and an outcomes-based budgeting process; Edith Penrose’s on the dynamic capabilities of value-creating organizations; Carlota Perez’s on tilting the playing field towards a smart green transition.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism