Read Mission Driven-Research and Innovation Discussion Paper

The paper is divided into four sections: the first section defines the concept of mission-driven innovation, the second section further explores the concept through the example of the Apollo moon mission, and the third section attempts to build on this high-level thinking to describe how the concept works in practice and highlight associated governance challenges. [...] THE CONCEPT OF MISSION-DRIVEN RESEARCH AND INNOVATION Although much of the current discussion of mission-driven innovation has been influenced by the work of economist Mariana Mazzucato, it is important to situate missions as part of a much older tradition—we can point to the Apollo lunar mission, the Manhattan Project, or even the British government’s Longitude Prize in the 1700s. [...] Here she is developing themes from her earlier book in which she describes the state as entrepreneurial because “most of the radical, revolutionary innovations that have fueled the dynamics of capitalism—from railroads to the Internet, to modern-day nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals—trace the most courageous early and capital-intensive ‘entrepreneurial’ investments back to the State” (Mazzucato 2. [...] The development of the Apollo program’s computer hardware and software set the stage for the IT revolution, and with it the social, economic, and political upheavals we are still trying to resolve (Mazzucato, 2021). [...] In The Entrepreneurial State, Mazzucato (2014) devotes a chapter to the problem of the socialization of risks and the privatization of rewards.