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The standard model also paints innovation as a discrete, individual achievement—the work of a sole, usually male genius. Such narrow conceptions leave plenty out: think of the custodians who ensure that testing sites remain standardized, the spouses who make it easier for technical experts to work long hours, and the hourly laborers who ensure that repetitive yet crucial tasks are completed. In these ways, the standard model effectively erects a rigid boundary between innovators and laypeople, one that both reflects and reinforces existing social hierarchies. This arrangement creates problems for the substance of technological development. For one thing, it means that innovation is done only from a narrow perspective, missing the opportunity to encourage a broad range of viewpoints and concerns in the early stages of ideation, development, and design. Moreover, it devalues the abilities of those at the grassroots, who may lack specialized training and resources but who have a deep understanding of the problems they face—and often have clear ideas about how to solve them.

Some steps have been taken to bring the public into the fold. Take the water crisis in Flint, Michigan that broke out in 2014. Researchers flocked to the city to help it cope with lead poisoning, Legionnaire’s disease, and the scores of pipes that were damaged after the local government switched its water source to the Flint River. But many citizens were wary. Not only was the low-income, majority-Black community well aware of the racist history of science that included the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; they had also had previous engagements with researchers that left them feeling invisible. In these interactions, researchers had both diminished community knowledge and concerns and appropriated their ideas. This learned wariness was validated during the crisis: at first, scientists dismissed the severity of the city pipes’ lead problem and any link between the Legionnaire’s outbreak and the water supply.

Yet it is also the case that, as regards intellectual property law and

information policy, the modern state has not revealed itself only to be captured

What are states to do? In cases where technological breakthroughs have occurred as a result of targeted state¶ interventions benefiting specific companies, the state should reap some of the rewards over time by retaining ownership of a small proportion of the intellectual property it had a hand in creating. The prospect of state ownership in private corporations may be anathema to many parts of the capitalist world, but given that governments are already investing in the private sector, they should earn a return on those investments. The state need not hold a controlling stake, but it could hold equity in the form of preferred stocks that get priority in receiving dividends. The returns could be used to fund future innovation. In short, rather than worry so much about the problem of picking winners, we should focus on how to reward winning investments so they can cover eventual losses and also raise funds for future investments. Alongside these efforts, we also need to rethink how public investments are accounted for in national income accounting. Investments in innovation should not be thought of as current expenditures. When setting limits to fiscal deficits, it is therefore necessary to distinguish public debt contracted for value-creating investment in R&D and infrastructure from public debt contracted for public or private consumption. In this sense, financial and accounting reforms should be regarded as a prerequisite for any successful smart and inclusive growth plan. Finally, acknowledging the role of government as a primary risktaker and source of wealth creation will require a decisive break with the theory of shareholder value maximization, which treats company shareholders as the most significant risk-takers and¶ emphasizes short-term returns in the form of boosted stock prices. The widespread influence of this theory underpins the exorbitant rewards earned by senior executives in recent years and has been a key driver of the economic inequality between the top 1 percent of income earners and the rest. Combatting short-termism and speculative forms of corporate governance will require aggressive reform of finance and corporate governance as well as more fundamental rethinking of the models of wealth creation upon¶ which they are based. What are some possible concerns with the approach we advocate? One involves the setting of missions and the direction of market¶ shaping. Clearly governments can and do become captured by particular interest groups, which limit their ability to establish missions and follow through on them. The failure of climate change policy and escalating inequality are obvious examples. Government subsidies continue to favor vested interests (such as fossil fuel energy firms), while taxation policy favors labor-saving (increasing¶ unemployment or underemployment) over resource saving (supporting decarbonization). And, of course, democracy is no¶ guarantee that social missions—such as climate change—will be adopted globally, as the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations in¶ the United States and Brazil have demonstrated. These are important concerns, but arguably result from governments not doing enough to shape markets to support social policy goals in the first place. It is by adopting a mission-oriented approach that we can best meet the challenges before us.

These property rights are justified on the basis that creation and innovation will take place only if those doing this work are adequately protected from free riders—those who would prematurely take and profit from others’ work.10 But there are concerns that developments in IP protection are going well beyond adequate protection for creators toward absolute protection. More and more time, energy, and money are being spent establishing and enforcing IP and less and less on innovating and creating. In addition, more and more “downstream” creators are being stymied and deterred by the thicket of protection.11 Overall, this means that society is paying the cost of IP—in terms of both the costs of the creations we have and the cost of forgone creations.12 How do we account for the fact that many creations of the mind build on an existing intellectual commons, on what many minds over time have produced? Musicians from folk artists like Woody Guthrie to hip-hop artists like DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) explicitly acknowledge that their music is possible only because of the contributions of earlier musicians.13 The risk with overly protective IP protection is that it hides the debt that all creators owe to the contributions of others in their field—to their commons. Others share these concerns, and, particularly in the area of information technology, there is a flourishing of experiments with privateproperty and open-access resources that prioritize the relationships between people over our relationships to things and, in the process, build new online communities. Initiatives include the Creative Commons, open-source software (like Linux and Firefox), and free software (like GNU) and its associated innovations, General Public License and Copyleft. Far from losing out, businesses are finding that open-access collaborative design practices can increase their market share and ensure loyalty and vibrant innovation.14 If our love affair with technology has given rise to open-access commons, it is a love affair that is also eroding our commons. So much of the technology that we take for granted today relies on our planet’s nonrenewable resources—whether resources in the component parts of our technological devices or those used to power the production and operation of these devices. Currently we seem willing to trade our coastlines and our weather systems for patterns of development and growth that rely on burning nonrenewable fossil fuels. Can the practice of commoning be applied to climate change as a way of taking back the economy and contributing to, rather than undermining, our planet’s survival? We know that our climate has been warming since the 1860s (for six generations).15 As an earth community we are shitting in the nest, to use a common expression, and largely failing to care for our most precious commons. How we have mistreated our atmosphere is a global tragedy of an unmanaged open-access resource. There are, however, glimmers of hope that this neglect will not continue. Over the past two generations at least, people have been involved in commoning the atmosphere by arguing for protocols of behavior that maintain and replenish its life-giving properties. This action has often been prompted by scientific discoveries about the complex systems that make up our atmosphere, including the mix of life-giving and lifedestroying gases and liquids produced on earth. Take, for example, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which were invented in 1920 and became widely used in air conditioners, refrigerators, and aerosols until their use was banned in minority-world countries from take back property 145 1996 and in majority-world countries from 2010. As a global community we have decided to cease production of the CFCs that have thinned the ozone layers of the stratosphere, allowing damaging rays to reach earth and cause cancer.16 But, as we show on the Ozone Commons Yardstick, it will not be until 2070 at the earliest—that is, two generations from now!—that the ozone hole will be repaired and we will not need to be so protective of the skin of future children or quite so worried. Clearly we cannot know what the future will hold, but we can try to make assessments based on the scenarios offered by scientists who work on climate change. Many vocal commentators are convinced that humans need not worry about global warming, that our inventiveness has, in the past, overcome grave challenges like global oil and food shortages and the threat of millennium bugs and nuclear winters. Some say that the newest threats (if indeed real) will surely be overcome by whiz-bang technological fixes—nuclear power or geoengineering of ocean and atmospheric conditions. Invariably, when these types of technosolutions are put forward, the agenda is to find ways for “business as usual” to continue. The focus of attention too often shifts to the efficacy of the various fixes, and we lose an opportunity to reflect on whether the planet can sustain business as usual or how fixes in one area will inevitably flow on to other commons. With our Commons Yardstick in mind, perhaps we can more clearly identify the issues and time frames that confront us. On the Atmospheric Commons Yardstick we identify the 1860s as the period from which average temperatures have been rising several degrees Fahrenheit. It was not until the 1950s that scientists started to systematically study global warming (helped by increased U.S. government funding in the sciences because of the cold war). Even though the scientific evidence was mounting, it was almost two generations later, in 1997, that the Kyoto Protocol was signed by most minority-world governments, agreeing to reduce 146 take back property greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels for the period 2008–2012. Ten years after that, in 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore for their efforts in generating and disseminating knowledge about humaninduced climate change.

This report has exposed the nature of the role of the public sector in making investments, which now go far beyond market fixing, to take a more active role as an ‘entrepreneurial state’ setting the direction of innovation. Yet despite the state’s evolving role and the fact that the public now shoulder considerable investment risk, we never share directly in the upside of its investments. The UK now invests over £14.4bn every year in directly funding and facilitating R&D through tax credits. This is a substantial amount and comparable to the £25bn the private sector spends each year on R&D. We desperately need a new model both to ensure that we get a more direct return on that investment as well as use the IP that is generated to pursue specific social and non-monetary goals. The current market failure theory, which emphasises the state’s return through indirect means such as economic growth and job creation, is no longer sufficient. However, when looking at existing model there are issues with both too closed and too open IP regimes. We therefore need to create a new system where we navigate between these two extremes. Our proposal for the creation of a Public IP commons will radically change the domestic R&D sector and enable a large quantity of IP to be accessed by more companies and individuals. As we have outlined in this paper, we must ensure that there are proper rules and mechanism to govern and manage access to this new IP commons if it is to be successful. Our proposal meets the four goals to recognise the state as owner of the IP that it funds, to maximise the potential for innovation by licensing as widely as possible, allows the IPCMB to license to purpose-driven and social organisation at no/low cost and recognises the huge non-monetary value of IP. We need to urgently need to change from the status quo. We hope that this paper will be part of the important discussion that needs to take place about how best to recognise the new role of the state and how to ensure that the IP that we the public fund delivers most benefit to us.

Why could this policy “not be named”? The short answer is that industrial policy was one of the many casualties of an international shift in economic policy that began in the 1980s and flourished under the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. The emergent sensibility—what we now call neoliberalism—was codified in 1989 in the Washington Consensus, which championed privatization, deregulation, and free trade. Along with these central pillars came an emphasis on low budget deficits, independent central banks focused on low inflation, and the liberalization of trade and foreign direct investment. This outlook was deeply confident in markets and deeply skeptical of government action, beyond the state's limited role in enforcing property rules and investing in education and defense. “On the basis of an exhaustive review of the experience of developing economies during the last thirty years,” the World Bank summed up in the early 1990s, “attempts to guide resource allocation with nonmarket mechanisms have generally failed to improve economic performance.” Today it is precisely those “market mechanisms” that appear not to have delivered on their promise. An equally exhaustive review of the experience of several advanced economies during the last few decades—from the 2008 financial crisis, populist challenges to globalization, and vast increases in economic inequality to decaying infrastructure, climate change, and the broader pursuit of shortterm profit at the expense of long-term investment—has badly tarnished the reputation of neoliberal market fundamentalism. Under this regime, modern capitalist markets have proven themselves unable to create an even distribution of wealth and income, ecological sustainability, affordable shelter and health care, and a sufficient number of high-quality middle-class jobs. Amidst this policy crisis, industrial policy is making a comeback, shaping high-level discussions at the intersection of trade policy and economic growth on subjects from artificial intelligence to climate change. Yet how exactly industrial policy ought to be implemented remains very much an open question. Given that the U.S. government has been out of practice at industrial policy for four decades, some observers have called for a cautious, incremental approach. We think this is exactly the wrong strategy. Industrial policy should be ambitious in tackling the most serious challenges facing the world today. But precisely because many of these challenges are so expansive and open-ended, we also cannot simply return to the industrial policy of the postwar era, which tended to focus on more narrowly defined technological goals and specific sectors. We need a new vision, one that draws from the industrial policy of the past while responding to the unique conditions of the present. That is exactly what we aim to sketch here. By undertaking well-defined missions, investing in a wide range of sectors, and nurturing new economic landscapes, policymakers can steer the overarching course of economic growth while leaving it to private enterprise to fill in the details. Indeed, a great deal of success is already being made in this direction, from Germany's impressive green energy transformation to Sweden's decarbonization of its food system. This framework—what we call a mission-oriented approach to industrial policy—rejects many of the basic premises of market fundamentalism, especially its extremely limited vision for government. At the same time, it recognizes the risks, both political and economic, of excessively top-down planning by an overbearing state. Charting a course between these extremes, mission-oriented industrial policy instead uses government action to incentivize economic activity in the direction of ambitious social goals— whether reducing inequality, fostering sustainable development, or arresting climate catastrophe. If we are to solve such problems, the last four decades have shown, we must embrace an active role for government in creating and shaping new markets—not just in regulating them or intervening when they fail.

We still have thirteen years to go before we reach Keynes’ prophetic year, but we’re not exactly on the way to it. Americans are working harder than ever.

Keynes may be proven right about technological progress. We’re on the verge of 3-D printing, driverless cars, delivery drones, and robots that can serve us coffee in the morning and make our beds.

Many of the most valuable assets in contemporary capitalism are not physical assets like land, buildings or machinery, but creations of the collective human intellect, such as a copyright on a design or patent on an innovation. Because these ethereal concepts cannot be possessed and protected like physical objects or space, a specific legal and policy architecture has been created giving extensive rights to the owners of this ‘intellectual property.’ The principle right is the exclusion of others from using one’s intellectual property without explicit permission, with those who do subject to legal action. Intellectual property is a relatively new concept, emerging in the late 15th century in the Venetian Republic, where exclusive rights began to be offered to those introducing new innovations, either through import or invention.1 In 1624, England enacted the Statute of Monopolies2, which rewarded inventors with strong property rights over their innovations and enabled them to capture significant monetary rewards. Some have argued that this incentivised innovation and enabled the industrial revolution to flourish in Britain3 This idea was so powerful that it was incorporated into Article One of the US constitution, which states that Congress should, “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors to the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”4 As time progressed, and the US established itself as a global innovation superpower, it became received wisdom that intellectual property in the form of copyright, trademark and patent protection was necessary to encourage innovation and the creation of new ideas and inventions such a machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and films. As the products of collective thinking, wide-reaching intellectual communities and the sharing of ideas, this logic of protecting the fruits of private resource and capital investment does not, in many respects, make intuitive sense, although some have argued forcefully against this, by positing that impedes innovation and concentrates wealth.5 However as the public sector has engaged more actively in funding research and development (R&D) using public money, the intellectual property that emerges from that research has not become the protected property of the public realm; rather, it is currently enclosed and appropriated by private owners. Although public sector intervention has often been focused on addressing specific market failures - with benefits accruing to the public sector through the newly functioning markets, thereby creating jobs and extra tax receipts, the following section outlines, how this role for the state in investment has changed over time.

Given their inherently political nature and central role in the economic system, were our IP and R&D systems to be transformed, they could be harnessed for the common good and to build an equitable, democratic and environmentally sustainable future for all. Extending principles of democratic ownership is key to this transformation. From the creation of a public knowledge commons, to substantially increasing public R&D funding, to embedding global solidarity and reparations, to challenging corporate power, to bolstering workers’ rights, we have the power to reimagine management of creations of the mind. Through increasing public R&D investment to 2% or more of national GDP, we can significantly boost innovation to address the many intersecting crises and challenges we now face (and are likely to face as the century progresses), and channel that investment to stimulate innovations that benefit society, promote equality, and create environmental reliance and an ecologically sustainable economy. This investment would be supported by a new ecosystem of institutions, such as local, regional, and national publicly owned investment banks, as well as approaches to provide a foundation through which alternative models of ownership can flourish to challenge corporate power. In place of inefficient tax giveaways, incentives, and subsidies, we should develop a mission orientated approach to ensure that innovations are geared toward tackling today’s intersecting crises, safeguarded by strong regulations and the mandate for proactive public intervention and economic planning. At the heart of this strategy is the need to significantly grow the public stake in IP, by reorienting the role of the state from a laissez faire and crony capitalist approach to one inherently involved in shaping the production and distribution of innovations. This should be done first and foremost through the development of a publicly owned and democratically governed IP commons to redirect revenue generated from patents back into the public purse (and back into further investments in innovation), rein in and reshape corporate behaviour by safeguarding workers’ rights and preventing tax abuse and loopholes, stimulate innovation, and promote equality. This would be complemented by the creation of publicly owned, and democratically governed venture capital funds at various levels of governance to provide investment (in return for appropriate ownership stakes) in start-up ventures and highly innovative enterprises. As the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated, we particularly need to explore pioneering ways to reverse the stagnation in the development of needed medical products, control drug prices, and bring about universal access to medicines, clawing back the power and control exerted over this vital sector from big pharmaceutical companies. In place of corporate capture and control over lifesaving and life-prolonging medicines, we need publicly directed, accountable, and owned pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and distribution entities to not only regulate pricing in the US and UK but provide access to medicines throughout the world through technological transfers. Indeed, from COVID-19 to the climate crisis to rampant social and economic inequality, the interwoven crises we face today are international in their nature. Moreover, the US and UK in particular must acknowledge and actively redress the incredible harm they have wrought on much of the rest of the world, especially the Global South, through colonialism, enslavement, imperialism, and the ongoing process of wealth and knowledge extraction. A reparative approach in general, and technological transfers in particular, must thus go far beyond simply making prices more affordable and products more available in the Global South. Instead, any new approach to IP and R&D must center a comprehensive shifting of rights and control by transferring certain IP, removing IP restrictions on various critical innovations and making them available to all, and overhauling the pro-corporate, pro-enclosure IP rules and systems that predominate in international free trade agreements and international institutions. IP and R&D systems and approaches are critical to the functioning of any economic system, and despite decades of privatization, enclosure, and corporate capture, they are still, largely, within our ability to reimagine and redesign. By applying principles of democratic public ownership and control, we can, and must, turn these systems into engines that power an equitable, democratic, and sustainable 21st century economy.

While reliance on protective structures and strategies developed during the IP expansionist age, such as open source licences, may still be locally effective to counter intellectual enclosures,Footnote71 a truly counter-hegemonic research agenda can no longer be based solely on traditional public-domain-enhancing doctrines. When de facto powers and self-enforcement mechanisms become functional equivalents to IP exclusivity, and control of essential factors of production can be almost entirely determined by unilateral action no longer mediated by law, lawless commodification supplants the IP regime as the primary determinant of commodification of intangibles. Probably for the first time in history, capitalism can now govern the processes of extraction and accumulation of capital in the (quasi) absence of law and legal institutions, such as formally recognised property rights.Footnote72 In this scenario, legal principles that ‘weaken’ IP rights have mainly the effect of expanding the ‘no man’s land’ where brute power is the only currency. It is therefore no surprise that the (once) counter-hegemonic discourse of ‘weak IP’ has been eagerly co-opted by dominating IT corporations and successfully used as a lobbying tool. Footnote73 Even less surprising is the co-optation of language and tools of ‘openness’ by rampant capitalism, from big pharma’s hijacking of ‘open science’Footnote74 to big tech’s appropriation of open-source software code under the guise of endorsing ‘open innovation’.Footnote75

As this suggests, and more broadly, the argument here underscores two further points about IP. First, the cultural and economic arguments need to be understood together in terms of a larger, public biopolitics of innovation. In that space, more traditionally “political” questions are important to foreground. For example, even where “negative spaces” of IP exist, there is a risk that they would immediately be appropriated by cultural elites or market actors. This is the force of Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder’s (2004) warning against the “romance of the public domain.” To locate something in the public domain means that it is free for everyone to use. In the case of indigenous people in particular, this can have disastrous results, as it not only reinscribes the idea that indigenous people are objects of knowledge but not producers, but also potentially opens up their entire cultural production to expropriation by Western multinationals. At the same time, as Hemmungs Wirtén (2008) points out, the original English commons land use regimes were fundamentally regimes designed to manage around poverty under feudalism. Any return to public biopolitics or a different understanding of property cannot be a return either to poverty or to feudalism.

In terms of understanding IP, the most important result of this study is that it is useful to understand IP as a kind of power. Further, it is important to understand power in differential terms, as operating according to different logics. This has several implications. First, criticisms of IP that address primarily its quantity or decry it as a form of power only tell part of the story. It is true that there is “more” IP law now than in the past, measured both in terms of its extension into new areas and its intensity in the areas that it does cover. That argument is important, but it does not say why that quantitative increase in IP is either bad or good. Indeed, it runs the risk of defaulting to a position that the alternative to too much IP is no IP. It might be the case that no IP would be good, but such claims often seem tethered to the idea that a world without IP would be a world without the imbrication of power relations into cultural production. A second implication is that we have no reason to assume that such a world without power could ever be the case, and many reasons to think that it would not. Cultural production inevitably involves power relations. This point is harder to see than it should be because neoliberalism is depoliticizing, hiding its political economy behind a veneer of internalization and consumer preferences.1 An excessive focus on markets makes us forget why the spaces outside of markets matter; or, as Hardt and Negri memorably put it, “private property makes us stupid” (2004, p. 188). This is particularly clear in the way that DRM deflects responsibility for the control it exerts over users onto supposedly neutral technological platforms rather than those who insist on their presence, as I argued in Chapter 3 on copyright. In such an environment, it is too easy to fail to recognize the extent to which IP necessarily embodies political relations, and the extent to which its absence will also embody political relations. The inference from the absence of IP to the absence of power is without foundation.2 Research into so-called low-IP zones – areas of cultural production where IP law is unavailable or has been rejected by the relevant actors – shows that there are a range of alternatives to IP, but that all of them involve complex relations of power, whether that power is exercised through social norms, market pressures, architectural features, or direct physical coercion.3 This research is fascinating and valuable precisely because it helps us to imagine a world with different kinds of social relations around intellectual goods. These relations can, but do not necessarily have to, rely on social norms. For one, IP law itself interacts in complicated ways with social norms, especially when transgression of property is itself a form of critique. Hip-hop sampling is a prominent example in a constellation of often (but not necessarily) critical practices that functions critically precisely when it is at the margins of legality.4 Indeed, if one’s goal is innovation, social norms can work to dampen innovation by siloing creativity into narrow channels, away from the benefits of cross-fertilization (Bair & Pedraza-Fariña, 2018). In any case, social norms matter when it comes to our relations to intellectual goods, and how they make us as people.

It is therefore vital that any Public IP commons does not act to overly restrict access to the IP that it holds even though this may be a way for it to maximise its revenue. However, as the following section outlines, just making the IP fully open is also not the answer, as this would be likely to have similarly negative consequences.

— Fully open regimes have downsides

As countries grapple with the devastating challenges of COVID-19 and we, hopefully, move closer towards the development of a vaccine, the injustices and insufficiencies of the current approach to IP and R&D are becoming increasingly apparent. It is imperative that we quickly move away from the current system that prioritizes corporate profits sourced from monopoly rights to one that values and centers public health, social equality, and ecological sustainability.

The design, implementation, and governance of our IP and R&D systems are critically important. However, the incredible rise of the intangible economy has dramatically altered these systems and our wider economic landscape. Rather than stimulating and supporting the innovation needed to power the 21st-century digital economy, the enclosure of ownership of creations of the mind has been capitalized on to generate vast profits and considerably increase the power and control of a small group of large corporations and their owners. This has resulted in a series of adverse consequences, from languishing innovation to exacerbating racial, economic, gender, and geographic inequality, to reducing competition, to abusive corporate practices related to workers’ rights, tax justice, and consumer protections. In sum, it is becoming increasingly clear to observers from across the political spectrum that the current approach to IP and R&D is not fit for purpose.

This depiction of the state as a neoliberal Leviathan has become commonsensical. I will not here attempt to defend an alternative account of the modern state, but I do want to suggest grounds to suspect that this neoliberal image does not serve us well. For example, as I will show, neither side in the current debates over IP sustains an image of the state as irredeemably neoliberal because a capable, flexible, and responsive state is essential to each side’s competing vision of the good life. Insofar as our theories require a decent state, it seems important to be able to describe one and to offer an account of the conditions that might sustain it. Moreover, there is some evidence in the domain of information policy that the modern state can be capable and efficacious, as well as open to democratic claims-making.

In the domain of IP scholarship, and undoubtedly also beyond, we need a serious, curious engagement with the state of the modern state. That engagement ought not ignore evidence that the modern state is vulnerable to ineptitude, and can be commandeered to achieve undemocratic aims. It should insist, instead, that we better understand the conditions in which this is more or less likely to be true. Ultimately, the field of IP law needs a post-neoliberal imaginary of the state, not because we are sure that we can bring such a state about but because we cannot bring it about if we assume it away.

The capable state is a concept that we seem to be unable to live without,

though this is admittedly not the same thing as showing that such a state does or

“Almost all the problems we face nowadays are complex, interconnected, contradictory, located in an uncertain environment and embedded in landscapes that are rapidly changing” according to Sardar (2010:183). Over and above the use of nuclear or biological weapons, potential risks are associated with emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, geoengineering, and nanotechnology (Baum, 2015). Unlike the threats of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction, however, novel technologies such as genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (GNR) do not require large-scale activities to pose threats to humankind, but only require knowledge, posing the threat of knowledge-enabled mass destruction, “amplified by the power of self-replication” (Joy, 2000:1).

How does one address such threats? To do so, a choice must be made in terms of what scientific methodology to use, and a definition is required, as to what it means to ‘address’ such threats. Given the almost unimaginable uncertainties associated with technological advancement and its consequences (Vinge, 1993; Szerszynski, Kearnes, Macnaghten, Owen, & Stilgoe, 2013; Bostrom, 2017; Tegmark, 2017), and therefore the need for responsible innovation (Grunwald, 2011; Stilgoe, Owen, & Macnaghten, 2013), this paper takes recourse to the approach of future studies to develop a theoretical framework relating to how to prepare for such scenarios. In doing so, this paper also seeks to advance the argument that only through improvements in the capacity of humans to manage technology, can human agency survive into a technological future. This argument therefore draws from Tegmark’s (2017) logic, that given uncertainty about technological outcomes, an important goal is to immediately undertake technology-safety research, and make this research mainstream. As an organising framework, literature is used to derive six primary technological threats. These threats are used to guide and anchor discussions and arguments throughout different sections of the paper.

Second, policy experimentation is essential. A “lead-and-learn approach,” as Mazzucato and colleagues put it, is exactly right. Setting a mission requires bold leadership, but following through requires learning and iterative experimentation. New types of policies need to be designed, evaluated, and improved— continuously. Social priorities will evolve, and new trade-offs will emerge. As a result, policies will need to adapt to continuously shifting priorities among multiple social goals. Experimentation also has a role to play in policy diffusion. Much as technologies go through a sometimes-lengthy process of adoption, so too new types of policies need to be implemented in one jurisdiction, observed, evaluated, and then adopted by others. In renewable energy we have seen this phenomenon play out as U.S. states sequentially adopt renewable portfolio standards; the same is visible in countries adopting feed-in tariffs and net-zero climate goals. Louis Brandeis's laboratories of democracy are very much in play for twenty-first century industrial policy. In the same way that technologies can be de-risked through experimentation by early adopters, so too can policies. Barriers to greater policy experimentation arise not only from elusive creativity in policy design, but also from bureaucratic incentives to evaluate the benefits of new policies over easily quantifiable metrics, in the near term, and often for a narrow set of objectives. Performance management can make policies more efficient, but adaptive management requires space for learning from novel policies, some of which will have unintended adverse consequences. Careful policy evaluation and adjustment is essential, and we need much more of it. Third, the empirical support for how successful innovations have emerged in the past makes clear that a comprehensive and systemic approach to supporting mission-oriented innovation will be most likely to succeed. This is now so clear in part due to Mazzucato's earlier book, The Entrepreneurial State (2011). Touch screens, packet switching, and microprocessors all enjoyed direct government support, which extended well beyond traditional research and development (R&D), but crucially included support for demonstrations, early commercialization, and public procurement. We have seen the same in energy with the development of wind power and electric vehicles. I have seen evidence of successful industrial policy most clearly in my own research on the development of solar energy and how it became so inexpensive. A first observation is that no single country persisted in developing solar photovoltaics. Each leader relinquished its lead within a few years. The United States, Japan, Germany, Australia, and China each made a distinct contribution, reflecting the unique characteristics of their national innovation systems—their education infrastructure, industrial base, and culture. The United States funded R&D and directly purchased solar panels, stimulating an early industry. California experimented with policy through a series of fixed price standard contracts. Meanwhile, Japan's MITI coordinated multinational corporations like Sharp and Panasonic to share R&D, leading them to include solar in niche consumer applications, such as watches and calculators. MITI also launched the world's first residential solar subsidy program. Germany, through a process of policy diffusion, combined Japan's subsidy program and U.S. fixed price contracts and made them bigger and longer term to create a massive demand-pull signal to the world. This scale led equipment suppliers to build machines specifically for making solar panels. China met German demand through scrappy entrepreneurs, most of whom trained in Australia. Later the central government supported these firms through tens of billions in loans, but only after the industry legitimized itself by selling panels to Germany and going public on Wall Street. Ultimately, solar became cheap thanks to many forms of knowledge diffusion around the world: sometimes as ideas in scientific publications, sometimes as tacit knowledge in the heads of internationally mobile individuals, and crucially as knowledge embodied in production equipment that could be used anywhere. For all these reasons, the success of a mission-oriented approach will hinge on at least four key principles. 1. Be wary of innovation nationalism Mission-oriented industrial policy can easily fall into the trap of focusing on national rather than global priorities, but innovation nationalism will slow innovation. There are reasons for supporting national manufacturing, making supply chains more local, and perhaps improving resilience to disruptions. But these types of onshoring efforts need to be made with a clear-eyed view that innovation nationalism will slow down innovation. In areas like climate, we need the opposite; we need acceleration and innovation nationalism gets in the way. 2. Implement a broad set of policies Modern industrial policy involves a much more comprehensive approach to using the capabilities of governments than the industrial policy of the past. Instead of a low-cost government loan to a single firm, we should expect a mix of approaches: competitive solicitation for funding demonstration projects, government procurement of novel technologies, and preferential treatment in markets for technologies with promising long-term attributes. This approach will involve many policies, some of which will overlap, interact, and even be redundant and partially misaligned. Some of this redundancy can be worked out with iterative experimentation. But much of it is helpful in making investor expectations of the commitment to the mission robust—that is, resilient to elections, technological setbacks, and other unanticipated events. 3. Embrace multiple goals A mission will need to address multiple goals—for example, not just economic growth, but also distributional impacts, inclusion, employment, political durability, and support for communities in transition. These goals also must move well beyond simply remedying isolated sources of market failure. As Mazzucato and colleagues make clear, market failure is just a point of departure; innovative, comprehensive solutions must be far more ambitious and move beyond incrementalism. 4. Anticipate risks It is essential to get serious upfront about managing the risks that will emerge from more comprehensive state intervention. These risks are real: they include rent seeking, regulatory capture, picking winners, information access, crowding out, and bureaucratic risk aversion. But if these issues are clearly and forthrightly anticipated, they can be managed. A general remedy is boosting the talent in government, equipping government agencies with sufficient quality data to make decisions, and empowering them to take diversifiable risks. A mission-oriented economy is an exciting concept because it has the potential to allow us to make progress on a set of stalled social problems. To make good on that potential, we must adopt a different policy mindset—one that places innovation at the center and embraces iterative policy experimentation as the means to implement the mission.

As a result of these views, the industrial and innovation policies of the past have largely been horizontal rather than vertical. Instead of articulating system-wide missions and fostering the economywide learning required for their achievement, the role of the state has been confined to leveling the playing field for commercial actors —mostly through supply-side inputs such as better skills or the removal of market frictions—and then getting out of the way. At the macroeconomic level, the market failure approach to industrial policy limits the role of the state to “stabilization”—mitigating the impact of the business cycle—and remains neutral about which markets are being created. Governments have accepted externally imposed rules-based frameworks limiting discretionary interventions. Fiscal policy is constrained by the “discipline” of tight budget deficit targets, and central banks are limited by tight mandates oriented toward price stability above and beyond other goals and are operationally independent of governments and thus not susceptible to political capture. The financial and pandemic crises of the last fifteen years and escalation of the climate and environmental emergency make it clear that such an approach is not enough. We need a different approach to policymaking: a mission-oriented framework that focuses government action on solving fundamental challenges rather than waiting for the solution to trickle down through competitive market forces. Such an alternative approach is built around four key principles that take inspiration from Karl Polanyi's description of the “embeddedness” of the economy in society and culture, weaving together the private sector, the state, and civil society in a collective effort to serve the public good. First, the state should do far more than passively react to market failures. It should play an active role in creating and shaping markets in the direction of well-defined missions, using the full arsenal of policy instruments at its disposal—including public investment, regulation, demand-stimulating procurement, macroeconomic policy, and education and skills training. Second, building the state's capacity and willingness to make high-risk investments depends on developing dynamic public sector organizations that welcome experimentation and the possibility of failure, all while creating the conditions for cross-sectoral learning and progress. Third, assessing public investment and evaluating mission success requires new measures of progress in place of those used by the market failure approach, which emphasizes cost–benefit analysis, the efficient allocation of resources in the short term rather than over the long term, and tightly constrained budgets. And fourth, sustaining successful industrial policy requires rethinking the way risks and rewards are distributed between the state and the private sector to ensure the government is rewarded for its successes. We discuss each of these principles in turn. Together, they show how we can move policy from the existing support-and-measure approach—find the market failure; fix it with a support instrument; measure the impact—to a lead-and-learn approach: one that is based on creating and shaping markets using a variety of policy instruments with open-ended impact horizons and learning through wider social engagement and coordination.

Such trials are desperately needed. We are on the threshold of returning to the dark ages that preceded antibiotics. In the late 19th century, tuberculosis was humanity’s greatest scourge. Robert Koch, who identified the causative Mycobacterium tuberculosis, estimated that “one-seventh of all humans die of tuberculosis”. The disease is now on its way to becoming untreatable once more. Every year, nearly half a million new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) occur world-wide. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) strains, impervious to the most potent antibiotics in our arsenal, have already reared their head.

Even normally benign bacteria like Staphylococcus aeureus – golden staph – which harmlessly colonises our skin and nostrils, can cause lethal infections if they hitch a ride into the bloodstream on a catheter or through a surgical incision.