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MARIANA MAZZUCATO

One of Top 5 Major Economists according to Forbes, is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL)

Mariana Mazzucato (PhD), one of Top 5 Major Economists according to Forbes, is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP). She received her BA from Tufts University and her MA and PhD in Economics from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Her previous posts include the RM Phillips Professorial Chair at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. She is a selected fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and of the Italian National Science Academy (Lincei).

She is winner of international prizes including the 2020 John von Neumann Award, the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values, and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She was named as one of the ‘3 most important thinkers about innovation’ by The New Republic, one of the 50 most creative people in business in 2020 by Fast Company, and one of the 25 leaders shaping the future of capitalism by WIRED.

She is the author of three highly-acclaimed books: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (2013), The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018) and the newly released, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021).

In her newest book, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Mazzucato delivers a hard-hitting critique of modern capitalism that to solve the massive crises facing us, the system has to be fundamentally restructured to make it inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation that tackles concrete problems from the digital divide, to health pandemics, and our polluted cities. She offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.

Professor Mazzucato advises policy makers around the world, including Denmark, the UK, Austria, South Africa and even the Vatican, where she is contributing to a post-COVID-19 policy council and creates solutions towards grand challenges from the battle against climate warming to building resilient health systems by focusing on the relationship between innovation and the direction of growth to ensure the process is more innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable. Her current roles include:

Chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All
Member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors
Member of the South African President’s Economic Advisory Council
Member of the OECD Secretary General’s Advisory Group on a New Growth Narrative
Member of the UN High Level Advisory Board for Economic and Social Affairs
Member of Argentina’s Economic and Social Council
Member of Vinnova’s Advisory Panel in Sweden
Member of Norway’s Norway’s Research Council.
As Special Advisor for the EC Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation (2017-2019), she authored the high impact report on Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union, turning “missions” into a crucial new instrument in the European Commission’s Horizon innovation programme.

Professor Mazzucato tailors each presentation to the needs of his audience and is not limited to the topics we have listed below:

Innovation
Economics and Finance
Strategy

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“She offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.” — New York Times

An award-winning author and leading international economist delivers a hard-hitting and much needed critique of modern capitalism in which she argues that, to solve the massive crises facing us, we must be innovative — we must use collaborative, mission-oriented thinking while also bringing a stakeholder view of public private partnerships which means not only taking risks together but also sharing the rewards.

Capitalism is in crisis. The rich have gotten richer — the 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 44 percent of the world's wealth — while climate change is transforming — and in some cases wiping out—life on the planet. We are plagued by crises threatening our lives, and this situation is unsustainable. But how do we fix these problems decades in the making?

Mission Economy looks at the grand challenges facing us in a radically new way. Global warming, pollution, dementia, obesity, gun violence, mobility — these environmental, health, and social dilemmas are huge, complex, and have no simple solutions. Mariana Mazzucato argues we need to think bigger and mobilize our resources in a way that is as bold as inspirational as the moon landing — this time to the most ‘wicked’ social problems of our time. We can only begin to find answers if we fundamentally restructure capitalism to make it inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation that tackles concrete problems from the digital divide, to health pandemics, to our polluted cities. That means changing government tools and culture, creating new markers of corporate governance, and ensuring that corporations, society, and the government coalesce to share a common goal.

We did it to go to the moon. We can do it again to fix our problems and improve the lives of every one of us. We simply can no longer afford not to.

The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

Shortlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

Modern economies reward activities that extract value rather than create it. This must change to ensure a capitalism that works for us all.

A scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Every-thing rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been accounted and reveals how economic theory has failed to clearly delineate the difference between value creation and value extraction. Mariana Mazzucato argues that the increasingly blurry distinction between the two categories has allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they are just moving around existing value or, even worse, destroying it. The book uses case studies-from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma-to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, reward extractors and creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. In the process, innovation suffers and inequality rises.

The lesson here is urgent and sobering: to rescue our economy from the next inevitable crisis and to foster long-term economic growth, we will need to rethink capitalism, rethink the role of public policy and the importance of the public sector, and redefine how we measure value in our society.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

The world's most popular products, from the iPhone to Google Search, were funded not by private companies, but the taxpayer.

In this sharp and controversial international bestseller, an award-winning economist debunks the pervasive myth that the government is sluggish and inept, and at odds with a dynamic private sector. She reveals in detailed case studies that the opposite is true: the state is, and has been, our boldest and most valuable innovator. Denying this history is leading us down the wrong path. A select few get credit for what is an intensely collective effort, and the US government has started disinvesting from innovation. The repercussions could stunt economic growth and increase inequality. Mazzucato teaches us how to reverse this trend before it is too late.