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6. Societal Harms. Innovations sometimes do more than harm individuals or competitors; they damage society itself. We enumerate this category to capture a wide variety of antisocial outcomes that are more generalized than the particularized harms described above. We focus on three issues: risks to democracy, risks to the financial system, and distributive harms. Each of these issues is hugely important, and we can do no more than scratch the surface of any one of them in this Article.

The risks that social media poses to democratic values are becoming increasingly apparent. In addition to its addictive qualities, which hurt many users, social media is a conduit for dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories.304 Russian operatives have repeatedly used social media to spread propaganda designed to undermine free and fair elections in the United States and other democracies.305 Compelling evidence exists that in both 2016 and 2020, Russia used Facebook and other social media outlets to support the Trump campaign and to sow division among Americans.306 In a post-mortem on the 2016 election, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republicans, concluded that Russia’s social media strategy “was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump.”307 Committee Chairman Senator Richard Burr explained that Russia “flood[ed] social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls” to “exploit[] existing divisions” in U.S. society and “breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”308

Electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines result in a massive amount of waste and pollution. China is responsible for half of the total electric vehicles in the world—a number that is growing rapidly. About half of its retired batteries are not disposed in an environmentally sound way, causing significant waste and pollution problems detailed below. Batteries can be recycled but the cost is high, as it is with solar panels, which can contain hazardous materials. Most solar panels end up in landfills as do wind turbines, whose large blades are a major factor in their disposal. The United States does not have a policy for recycling these green technologies, which means that U.S. landfills can expect to see a massive increase in disposed materials from them as President Biden seeks to implement his net-zero carbon plan for all U.S. energy by 2050.

The green paradox literature shows that seemingly obvious propositions about climate change policy are often wrong. Commitment to future green policies, whether these policies are carbon pricing or subsidies to the innovation of clean energy technology, tends to raise current carbon emissions. The logic of the paradox is familiar: the anticipation of green policies lowers the expected returns from the future sale of fossil fuels and therefore lowers the opportunity cost of selling the fossil fuel today. This reduces fossil fuel prices, increasing the consumption of fossil fuels. Carbon emissions therefore rise instead of falling. 

The green paradox is generally framed in terms of the unintended impact of policies.1 But the idea extends directly to the impact of innovation, whether innovation is influenced by policy or not (Hoel, 2008, van der Ploeg and Cees, 2012). Consider, for example, a market for energy produced from oil in which the current price is 100 dollar per barrel and extraction costs are low. Suppose that a clean, inexhaustible energy substitute is discovered and becomes immediately available at a cost equivalent to 60 dollars per barrel of oil. The owner of any conventional fuel deposit would prefer to sell at 59.99 or less rather than share the energy market with the substitute. Oil from these deposits will be sold at a lower price and exhausted before clean energy captures any market share at all. With the drop in price, oil will thus be extracted more intensively and exhausted at an earlier date. The current flow of carbon emissions rises as a result of innovation as does the near-term stock of atmospheric greenhouse gases. 

More in general, the introduction of new technology can lead to ‘revenge effects.’  Pesticide and antibiotic use can create conditions where new super-weeds and super-bugs evolve, air-conditioning increases external temperatures, and expanding roads can  increase traffic and lead to more congestion. Tenner (1997) sub-divides these revenge  effects into rearranging, repeating, recomplicating, regenerating and recongesting effects. 

In some cases, the harm from innovation comes not from regular use but from  unanticipated accidents, such as Chernobyl. In other cases, the harm is an unintended  yet anticipated outcome that comes from proper use. This harm can be well-known or  hidden. A known side-effect of the proper use of cigarettes is lung cancer. A relatively  little-known fact about shale gas production is that it produces considerable amounts of  radioactive waste (Warner et al. 2013). Even the truck drivers disposing of this radio-  active waste are not aware that their truckload is radioactive (Nobel 2020).  

Again, Arrow’s scholarship is instructive. Arrow argues that when dominant companies innovate, they do so in an iterative manner, rather than in a way that is likely to bring about leaps in technological advancement.111 Their innovation follows the already-established path, or else they risk diminishing the value of their existing assets and losing their entrenched market positions. Correspondingly, it is maverick, challenger firms that are likely to produce disruptive, path-breaking innovations, as it is these outsiders that need to create genuinely new products and markets in order to thrive.112 The pharmaceutical industry is illustrative. Dominant pharmaceutical companies—‘Big Pharma’—typically justify high drug prices on Schumpeterian grounds. High prices, and high profits, are necessary to make the investment in R&D required to generate new pharmaceuticals.113 Yet, most drugs developed by Big Pharma are so-called ‘me too’ drugs, only slight molecular variations of existing drugs. Of the 415 pharmaceuticals approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 1998 and 2002, only 14 per cent were new innovations, 9 per cent represented functional improvements on existing drugs, and the remaining 77 per cent were me too drugs that delivered no functional improvement.114

Marko; August 11; Lecturer at the university of helsinki’s department of social research and author; The Digital Age and it’s Discontents, “The Blind Spots of Digital Innovation Fetishism,” Ch. 2, P. 31-32] tc

Innovation is a central keyword of economic policy planning in advanced capitalist countries. Above all, it signifies a call to reform all economic branches and social institutions in ways that make them more supportive of national competitiveness. Accordingly, universities are today not only sites for the study of innovation, but they are also increasingly imagined as business-oriented innovation powerhouses, especially by industry lobbies that find universities lacking in entrepreneurial vigour. Legions of educational and business publishers have answered these calls by churning out books and guides that aim to enhance innovation activities in private companies and public institutions. Adding to the same trend, the business press and the media in general frequently publicize stories on firms and entrepreneurs that are considered model innovators. As a result of these combined ideological efforts, public discussions and the media are today filled with calls to transform state institutions, labour markets, education and even basic cultural values so that these would better serve the spirit of innovation, upon which not only the health of the economy but whole societies is seen to depend. Due to the phenomenal growth of innovation rhetoric, it is no wonder that the concept has recently aroused critical interest. Paul A. David, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University (2012: 510), writes of ‘the innovation fetish’: an ‘excessive fixation upon innovation’ among the economic, political and educational elites, who have endowed it ‘with seemingly magical or spiritual powers associated with animistic or shamanistic rituals’. Pointing to similar aspects, Valaskivi (2012) writes of the rise of ‘innovationism’, a quasireligious discourse focusing on innovation that is carried forward especially by social media gurus, information and communication technology (ICT) company leaders, management consultants and researchers working in think tanks and business schools. It promotes the entrepreneurial values of individualism, inspiration, risk-taking and competitiveness, and attaches these to the key symbols of innovation, such as successful start-up companies and Silicon Valley. The latter has served as the ‘spiritual’ centre of innovation enthusiasm, while ICT entrepreneurs have been singled out as public role models that, together with new ICT and digital innovations, represent capitalist dynamism. These discourses form the core of contemporary digital innovation fetishism. But why call such discourses fetishistic? In traditional anthropological terms, a fetish refers to a religious object that is assumed to possess supernatural powers. Yet, the Durkheimian conclusion that innovation discourses offer ‘an accepted, self-evident, future-oriented—and collective—way of imagining a better future’ (Valaskivi 2012: 150) is not sufficient by itself. It registers a ‘religious’ dimension of innovation discourses—a means by which a collective may symbolically worship itself—but leaves out their ideological nature and how this effort takes place under the specific social relations determined by capitalist commodity production. Leading innovation discourses and practices have different effects for different groups of people, depending on their material and cultural capacities. The appeals to innovation and creativity may thus be empowering for the so-called high-net-worth individuals who invest in startup companies, or for the motivational speakers who cash in on those appeals on the business speaking circuit. However, they are much less empowering and more discouraging for low-paid workers who work long hours for those companies or in the gigantic warehouses of digital platform capitalism.

For writers such as Steven Pinker (for example, in his book ‘Enlightenment Now’), the  human condition is steadily improving, and this improvement can be picked up across a  range of indicators: fewer homicides, fewer infant deaths, longer life expectancies,  improving human rights, increasing literacy, increasing average education, increases in  mean (and also median) wealth, fewer people in extreme poverty (less than 1 USD/  day), etc.  

However, while not denying significant progress in some areas, particularly the  reduction in violence, cherry-picking data to support a comforting Whiggish conclusion  is unlikely to generate robust evidence.  

Innovation—real innovation—has shaped the world as we know it, and created the unprecedented wealth and wellbeing of current society. There are many horrors in this world that can be blamed on exploitation of people and natural resources in the pursuit of technological and social innovation for the benefit of the few. There are, likewise, grave economic injustices that are hard to separate from the largely innovation-based economic development of the Global North, and several examples of innovation being used by dictators and oppressors against the security, dignity and privacy of people. But overall, there can be no doubt that innovation—the “process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance” (Ridley 2020: 2)—has turned the world into an enormously safer, freer, richer, and more enjoyable place now than 50, 100, or 200 years ago. Imagine what innovation can do if it is allowed to continue to be this source of astonishing improvement. And imagine the losses we will suffer if we leave it stuck in emptiness.

This, finally, reveals another common reflex at play: current humanity’s default response to an identified problem with technology is to rely on ‘better’ technology to fix that ‘glitch’. There is of course nothing wrong in aiming to improve technological solutions – but how can we be so sure that these improved technologies actually are solutions, and not just part of the problem? Looking at our track-record over the centuries since industrialisation and the consequences of large scale deployment of technologies, there is little to suggest that reliance on new or improved technology to mitigate the impact of earlier technology will all of a sudden stop having the side effects which got us into this mess in the first place. In the age of the Anthropocene (where human conduct is the main determinant for the fate of life on Earth),24 past experience suggests we cannot afford a ‘trial and error’ approach in deploying technology at scale to save us from the problems earlier technologies have created. Rather, because of our technology-induced capacity to wipe all life off the face of the earth, any solutions we employ to deal with the crises we have created should, when again based on technologies and their application on a global scale, be scrutinised carefully for their impact, if not generally viewed rather sceptical.

In sum, based on our historical experience, there is unfortunately no reason to believe that developing new technologies and propagating them around the globe for widespread use (at least by those who can afford access to them) will necessarily enhance our welfare. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that, by and large, our use and abuse of technology is an – if not the – principal cause of most of the essential risks to our survival as a species on this planet. That in itself should call IP’s uncritical embracing of ‘technological innovation’ as well as its ‘transfer and dissemination’ into question. And this bleak conclusion has not even taken into account the uneven impact of our technologies on some of us, and on other living beings with whom we share this planet – an aspect briefly picked up in the next section.

The rhetoric of innovation implicitly asserts that all innovation is valuable, and that, ultimately, it will act as a tide that lifts all boats, to the benefit of everyone. However, this is an inadequate understanding of innovation, focusing only on its quantitative dimension and ignoring its qualitative aspects. It is misguided to assume that innovation is innately beneficial; innovation under capitalism is not brought about solely to further human flourishing, but in the service of profit.96 Correspondingly, the rhetoric of innovation is weakened by appreciating that ‘not all innovations are created equal and the direction of technology matters greatly’.97

Today, innovation enjoys broadly positive connotations. As noted above, it is called upon as a solution to a range of economic, political and social problems. Innovation is something to be strived for. It is rare for its content to be interrogated. However, engaging reflexively with innovation highlights the ambiguity of the concept. As documented by Benoît Godin, innovation has historically been a contested term. Techno-conservatives typically start their analyses of innovation with Schumpeter, but its history goes back far further. It may be traced to Greece in the fifth century BC, with innovation (kainotomia) derived from kainos (new).98 The ancient Greek understanding of innovation related to the breaking of custom, laws, and tradition, ‘introducing change to the established order’.99 Innovation gained an explicitly pejorative meaning in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, becoming a ‘linguistic weapon’ invoked to criticise those who contested the religious status quo.100 Innovation was a synonym for heresy, as exemplified in 1548 when King Edward VI, seeking to defend Protestantism in England against Catholicism, issued a royal injunction ‘against those that doeth innouate’.101 Over the next two centuries, it was political and social revolutionaries who would face the charge of innovation.102 Edmund Burke, habitually cited as the father of modern conservatism, provides a clear example of this tradition, describing innovation as the ‘greatest evil of all’.103

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942). But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010). More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970).

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995). Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

The evolutionary focus on the co-evolution of those processes creating variety between economic agents and the competitive selection process that winnows in on that variety, means that an evolutionary perspective on policy must consider adaptation (Flanagan and Uyarra 2016, this issue; Witt 2003). Policies should not be viewed as general a priori answers, but as being about learning and emergence. Which policy is best in which environment will emerge from experimentation and trial and error. A technological trajectory, in turn, represents the direction of learning, experimentation, and progress within a technological paradigm. Therefore, technology development is a problem-solving activity, and a technological paradigm “embodies strong prescriptions on the directions of technical change” (Dosi 1982, 152). This is why market signals are limited in terms of providing direction to techno-economic development; they only work within the parameters of the paradigm, which means they influence the rate of change more than the direction. When two or more technological paradigms compete, markets may influence which one is selected (the one that minimizes costs). Once established, however, paradigms have a powerful “exclusion effect,” whereby some technological possibilities are discarded because they are incompatible with the prevailing paradigm and are therefore “invisible” to agents. Thus, a techno-economic system of innovation may be locked into a self-reinforcing, path-dependent trajectory (Dosi and Nelson 1994). This becomes a problem if the trajectory being followed (or the paradigm itself) is inferior or suboptimal to what could be achieved with technologies that transgress the paradigm (or with a different paradigm).

Societal challenges require technological, behavioral, and systemic changes and have much to learn from those mission-oriented feats that led to putting humans on the moon and to the emergence of new general-purpose technologies ranging from the Internet to biotechnology and nanotechnology (Foray et al. 2012). It was only possible to achieve those missions when the public and private sectors worked together to create new technologies and sectors (Mowery, Nelson, and Martin 2010; Ruttan 2006). Crucially, the public side of such partnerships was not limited to incentivizing, facilitating, or de-risking the private sector. Rather, it required that (public) risks be taken through choosing a particular direction of change (Mazzucato 2013a). Such directionality did not occur from the topdown, but through a decentralized group of public agencies, what Block and Keller (2011) refer to as a “developmental network state.” Given the immense risks involved in choosing to develop particular sectors (such as nanotechnology), technologies (such as GPS), and broadly defined areas (such as the green economy), the relevant public institutions had to welcome the underlying uncertainty that such choices entail. Some options win (such as the Internet) while others fail (such as the commercialization of the Concorde airplane). Indeed, the success of innovative public organizations like DARPA in the US Department of Defense, which has been responsible for the financing of Arpanet (the seed of the Internet), has been attributed to the attention it paid to internal organizational dynamics, which nurtured experimentation and learning (Abbate 1999; Block 2008), better enabling what Hirshman (1967) once called “policy as process”.

Missions imply setting directions of change – that is, tilting (rather than leveling) the playing field to favor certain types of change more than others (Mazzucato and Perez 2015). The IT revolution was picked as was also the biotech and nanotech revolution (Block and Keller 2011; Mazzucato 2013a). What should be the core of the policy debate is not whether policies require picking and choosing but how to enable such picking to occur in a way that is guided by key lessons on how to nurture a learning and adaptation process which prevents the system from getting locked into suboptimal circumstances. Missions should be broad enough to catalyze many different sectors (the man on moon mission required a dozen sectors to engage) but concrete enough to translate into specific problems to solve, so that progress toward the mission can be evaluated on a continual basis.

3. Narrowly distributed benefits and unevenly shared consequences

To the extent that IP incentivises technology which also has benefits, a further question would be whether these benefits are evenly distributed, or at least widely shared so that we could consider them to be ‘utilitarian’? Without attempting to delve into the philosophical debates about defining utility, let’s take the classical approach of bringing about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number’.25 If we then define ‘good’ simply as what is desirable in that it materially benefits humans (noting that excludes other living beings with whom we share this planet, and the usually detrimental impact of modern technology on them),26 is IP at least operating so as to promote the welfare of all humans? This of course depends on whether the technologies and other advances incentivised via the IP system are likely to benefit all, or at least most human beings living on this planet.

Another critique picks up a thread from earlier on: the distinction between material and immaterial forms of technology. If we are strict materialists, then it looks like we have a problem. Material technology, by itself, seems to be insufficient grounds for optimism. There are two reasons for this. First, material technologies do not just ‘pop’ into existence from nothing. They require human labour and ingenuity. Second, material technologies can often be used for good or ill. For example, few people would argue that the invention of the nuclear bomb heralded in a new era of hope and optimism.Footnote12 Given that destructive technologies can be invented, how can we be optimistic about the future solely in virtue of the creation of more such technologies?

The answer is that we can’t. I already noted that a number of the optimistic books cited earlier on — in particular the works of Pinker (2011, 2018), Ridley (2010), McAfee (2019) and Naam (2013) — do not give technology, in and of itself, priority in their narratives. Instead, they focus on certain idea-generation and selection methods that have been adopted in the relatively recent past. Ridley and McAfee focus on market-based mechanisms for incentivising and weeding out certain kinds of innovations, Naam follows a similar train of thought but also gives the modern scientific revolution some bit of credit, Pinker is more ecumenical, mentioning the importance of markets, science, Enlightenment reason and liberal democracy. None of these authors denies that material innovations were crucial to progress, but they think the underlying social-institutional mechanisms for innovation were also important.

Solyndra was not the only company receiving loan guarantees from the DoE to develop clean technologies to go bankrupt. Three others also filed for Chapter 11: Fisker Automotive (filing for bankruptcy in 2013), Abound Solar and Vehicle Production Group (both filing in 2012). Altogether, these four companies defaulted on $780 million in loans, which represents just 2.28 per cent of the $34.2 billion loan guarantees offered by the DoE as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (the loan guarantee programme was intensified with the ARRA of 2009).

This default rate is in itself low, and inferior to the amount already repaid by other companies like Tesla Motors, which by the end of 2014 amounted to $810 million. In fact, the overall DoE loan guarantee programme is expected to earn taxpayers $5-6 billion in 20 years, according to a US government report to which Bloomberg had access at the end of 2014 (Doom 2014). As a market analyst interviewed by Bloomberg emphasized, a $5 billion return exceeds what many venture capital and private equity funds even dream to obtain as a return from their investments in clean energy. And this is the punch line: when seen as standalone investments, public funding to specific companies developing risky and uncertain innovations will be seen as failures if the company goes bankrupt. 'Governments are lousy at picking winners!' critics say. What is important, however, is to look at such 'picking winner' investments as a portfolio of long-term investments. From this perspective, DoE's loan guarantee programme is likely to become a huge success.

396 In theory, patents on harmful innovations could end up being prosocial to the extent that patents make those products more expensive, meaning that they get into the hands of fewer people. This would be, in effect, a “deadweight gain.” Crane has made a similar argument about anticompetitive effects in the tobacco industry. See Crane, supra note 369, at 362 (“[A]nticompetitive behavior would [not necessarily] increase net social welfare if it decreased cigarette consumption.”). We are skeptical that many or any such gains exist. If the occur for addictive products like cigarettes, then people may still pay the added cost of the patent-protected product. In other cases, the parties who are paying the added costs of patent protection are unlikely to be the ones harmed by the product. For example, a firm may be willing to pay for a patented product that allows it to surveil its employees, but the

employees’ harms are externalities to the exchange. It will be the rare instance, we think, that the patent “tax” on the product operates as a sin tax that reduces consumption.

Recently, economists such as Stephanie Kelton, who belong to the economic school called modern money theory (MMT), have been trying to get governments to realize that the idea that they have to come up with money before they can spend is reverse logic. In reality, spending itself creates money.23 The thinking builds on the work of Hyman Minsky, who wrote about the theory of money beyond the notion that it simply oils the wheels of commerce. Here’s how it works when applied to governments that are issuing their own currency, and are thus the monopoly issuers of that currency. The process logically starts with government spending/investing money. This is obvious, given that citizens cannot get their hands on money that is issued by government if the government had not spent or lent it into existence in the first place. Every time the government spends money, it taxes some of it back afterwards. If the government spends £10 and taxes £4, it can be said to be in deficit by £6. But that £6 is also in the hands of people and businesses. They are £6 better off. The other side of a government deficit is a private surplus. In other words, the government’s and the private sector’s balance sheets must be mirror images of each other (it is more complicated when we include exports and imports, but we do not need to do that for this discussion). A government deficit ‘blows’ British pounds onto balance sheets, while a government surplus ‘sucks’ pounds off balance sheets. A sustained fiscal surplus means constant sucking, which means that the private sector is losing financial assets, as maturing bonds are not reissued. Thus, fiscal surpluses weaken private-sector balance sheets.

It is useful to consider how budgeting actually works. A government department must first decide what it wants to do – and hence what missions are worth pursuing. Then it must persuade Parliament or Congress to accept a line in the national budget dedicated to that mission. If Parliament or Congress is persuaded, the relevant agency appropriates the budget and gets on with the job. Reducing or removing a budget in one department does not necessarily mean that more money is created for another department. Cutting NASA’s funding in the 1960s, for example, would not automatically have released more cash for the US Agency for International Development or Department of Health and Human Services.

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Perhaps less widely acknowledged is the economic case for a mission-oriented Entrepreneurial State. The economic impacts from such policies are often hard to quantify empirically (Bloom et al., 2019), being them associated with dynamic spillovers, even when the social ones are quite obvious. A priori, we would expect Entrepreneurial State policies to have high potential for generating growth due to the fact they target new markets, technologies and directions of discovery. This means they have also the potential to create opportunities for advancement in productivity, consumer demand, international competitiveness and so forth, which would not be created by the private sector alone (Mazzucato, 2013, Mazzucato, 2018). A recent assessment of the US moonshot program implemented during the 1960s finds large, first order and long lasting growth effects induced by public R&D conducted through the NASA (Kantor and Whalley, 2022). However, novel opportunities come together with additional risks, and it is not automatic that missions-oriented programs translate into success stories; to the contrary, for every winning mission-oriented investment there are many possible failures (Mazzucato, 2016). The ultimate result likely depends both on the uncontrollable uncertainty of the search process itself (Dosi, 1988) - which may well reveals unsuccessful - and on the politically controllable willingness of the government to sustain eventual costs and losses during the research path.

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Simulation results show remarkable differences across innovation policy regimes. First, all innovation policies spur productivity and GDP growth, but to different degrees, while this is not the case for transfers to households. Second, the impact of direct innovation policies is larger vis-à-vis indirect ones and entails effects of positive hysteresis (Cerra, Fatás, Saxena, Dosi, Pereira, Roventini, Virgillito, 2018) putting GDP on higher growth trajectories. However, Entrepreneurial-State policies are risky: their positive impact tend to show up on longer time horizons as compared with indirect interventions, and they can fail to discover new technologies. Nonetheless, extensive Monte Carlo analyses show that, on average, direct innovation policies deliver higher productivity and GDP growth, while being less expensive in terms of net public resources, compared to “indirect” forms of intervention. The impact of Entrepreneurial-State interventions is stronger when they combine the presence a public firm with a National Research Laboratory. Conversely, indirect monetary incentives tend to be associated with some redundancy - that is transfer of resources to firms with little effect on the intensity of search. Finally, all innovation policies we consider crowd in private R&D investment (in line with Moretti et al., 2019 and Pallante et al., 2020), although direct interventions provide, again, the most bang for their buck. Accordingly, our results suggest that the type of tools utilised by a mission-oriented Entrepreneurial State (Mazzucato, 2013, Mazzucato, 2018, Mazzucato, 2021) are also more effective at meeting uncontroversial innovation policy goals of productivity and growth gains.