Mariana Mazzucato is an economist whose work challenges a foundational assumption of much mainstream economic and political thought: that the private sector is the natural engine of innovation while the state is, at best, a corrector of market failures. In her best-known book, The Entrepreneurial State, she argues the opposite — that governments have historically been the boldest, most patient risk-takers, funding the foundational research and early-stage investment behind technologies that private firms later commercialized. Her frequently cited example is the smartphone, whose key underlying technologies, she contends, trace back to publicly funded research. From this she draws a political conclusion: if the public bears the risks of innovation, it should also share more directly in the rewards.
This argument places Mazzucato within a broadly progressive tradition that seeks to rehabilitate the active state without abandoning market economies. She is critical of austerity and of narratives that cast public spending as inherently wasteful, and she has developed the concept of "mission-oriented" policy — the idea that governments should organize investment around ambitious societal goals, such as decarbonization or public health, in the way that space programs once mobilized national effort. She also popularized a distinction between value creation and value extraction, arguing that finance and certain corporate practices often capture value they did not create.
Her influence has extended well beyond academia. Mazzucato has advised governments, international bodies, and multilateral institutions, and her vocabulary of missions and the entrepreneurial state has entered policy debates on industrial strategy, green transition, and innovation across Europe and beyond. She founded and directs a research institute at University College London devoted to studying public purpose in economic policy.
Critics from more market-oriented traditions argue that she understates the state's failures and the indispensable role of private risk-taking and competition, and some contend that celebrating government investment invites the very cronyism and misallocation she seeks to avoid. Supporters counter that she has restored legitimacy to public ambition after decades in which it was intellectually marginalized. Either way, her work has reshaped how policymakers and the educated public argue about the proper economic role of government.