There is, you might have heard, a sense among some in Silicon Valley that the very best thing government can do to spur innovation is to get so far out of the way that technologists can hardly see it from their garages, maker spaces and design labs.
As absolute dogma, that’s easy enough to dismiss. At open government data conferences, you hear again and again about GPS, the global positioning system developed by the U.S. military and pushed into the private sector by President Ronald Reagan. In a newly posted TED talk, University of Sussex economics professor Mariana Mazzucato moves the argument beyond such one-offs: If we want more innovation, we should start accepting that government has a proven ability to be innovative.
"The Internet was crazy," Mazzucato says. "It really was. The probability of failure was massive. You had to be completely to be nuts to do it. Luckily, they were."
Take out your phones out of your pockets, Mazzucato tells the TED crowd. Much of "what makes your phone a smartphone, instead of a stupid phone," was touched by government, and not just its geo-location capabilities or the ability to go online. Everything from the touchscreen to Siri is the product of either government research or funding that flowed from taxpayers to private researchers.
It isn’t even limited to tech, Mazzucato says. Some three-quarters of the cutting-edge drugs out there are the result of investments from the National Institutes of Health.
Of course, there’s a good bit of Steve Jobs and global supply chains and scores of Apple employees’ long hours baked into the iPhone, too, and Mazzucato acknowledges that her argument is too complex to fit neatly into a 14-minute TED talk. (She goes into greater depth in a follow-up Q&A.) But that serves to bolster her point: Innovation has many parents, and talking about government simply as a deadbeat doesn’t help innovation grow.
The historical record shows, Mazzucato says, that public-private partnerships can produce positive, revolutionary change. But, she says, the storyline insisting that government is either incompetent or a dangerous Leviathan in need of taming doesn’t help. "By talking about the state as kind of irrelevant, boring," she says, "it’s sometimes [sic] that we actually create those organizations in that way."
Traditionally in the United States, it’s been the federal government suffering through the role of unappreciated partner. But we’re seeing more local governments eager to be, if all goes well, similarly unacknowledged, like with San Francisco’s new Entreprenuership-in-Residence program. Whether that new local focus shifts how we talk about the role the “state” plays in innovation remains to be seen.
In the meantime, give Mazzucato’s talk a watch: