Marianna Mazzucato The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths

In the year or so since this book first appeared, it would be fair to say that it has attracted at least as much, and probably more, attention than any other full-length scholarly book on innovation policy. In your reviewer’s experience, this is the book most likely to have been read by people in government and the public service. This in itself is an achievement, and it is not difficult to see why. Prof Mazzucato has that rare knack of being able to pursue complex arguments in accessible language such that the informed reader is compelled to doubt the conventional wisdom. And it is high time that the conventional wisdom about the function and dynamics of innovation in contemporary economies was subjected to critical assault by someone of Prof Mazzucato’s stature. Ironically, as huge advances have been made in what is known about innovation from a scholarly perspective, policy has become encrusted not just by myth, but by serious misunderstanding about what is and is not known about it, and all too often by misinformation perpetrated by special interests.