Imagine a world in which the United States government — not the private sector — is the economy’s indispensable entrepreneur, innovating at the frontiers of science and technology, able and willing to take risks and to persevere through uncertainty.
That is the world depicted in “The Entrepreneurial State,” a recent book by Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at the University of Sussex who specializes in innovation. And it is, in fact, the way the United States has operated since World War II. Through the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies and departments, the government has for decades gone beyond financing research and creating the conditions for innovation to occur; it has also envisioned the future, engaged in the riskiest experimentation and overseen the commercialization process.
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To read the original article: America’s Underappreciated Entrepreneur: The Federal Government - NYTimes.com
