Mission driven innovation shifts the direction of innovation away from socially harmful options

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.