Ted Talk: Mariana Mazzucato: Government -- investor, risk-taker, innovator

Why doesn’t the government just get out of the way and let the private sector -- the “real revolutionaries” -- innovate? It’s rhetoric you hear everywhere, and Mariana Mazzucato wants to dispel it. In an energetic talk, she shows how the state -- which many see as a slow, hunkering behemoth -- is really one of our most exciting risk-takers and market-shapers.

States and governments are often depicted as slow, bureaucratic, risk-averse. That argument is used in support of making states smaller and the private sector bigger. In her latest book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Myths in Innovation and in her research, Mariana Mazzucato offers a bold contrarian view: States aren't only market regulators and fixers, but "market makers" -- actively creating a vision for innovation and investing in risky and uncertain areas where private capital may not see the ROI. Yes: Private venture capital is much less risk-taking than generally thought. As an example, the technology behind the iPhone and Google exists because the U.S. government has been very interventionist in funding innovation. Private investors jumped in only later. The same is true today of what promises to be the next big thing after the Internet: the green revolution.

Source: Ted Talks