Chapter 1
Reimagining the Future Through Mission-Driven Innovation
When President Kennedy announced in 1962 that America would put a man on the moon before the decade's end, he wasn't just launching a space mission-he was reimagining what government could achieve. This bold declaration came when the US lagged behind the Soviet Union in space technology and faced enormous technical uncertainties. Yet Kennedy framed the mission not in terms of cost but ambition, calling it "an act of faith and vision" that would transform society. The Apollo program ultimately employed 400,000 people and generated countless technological spillovers that fueled America's technological dominance for decades.
Mariana Mazzucato's "Mission Economy" has become required reading among policymakers worldwide, from the European Commission to the Biden administration. Named one of the most influential economists by Bloomberg, Mazzucato challenges conventional wisdom about government's role in innovation. Her book arrives at a critical moment when multiple crises-from climate change to inequality to pandemics-demand the kind of ambitious, coordinated response that made the moonshot possible. As Bill Gates noted, "Mazzucato's solution-oriented approach provides exactly the kind of innovative thinking we need."
Chapter 2
The Broken Promise of Modern Capitalism
Today's capitalism is failing to address our most pressing challenges. Global temperatures continue rising toward catastrophic levels, with 2023 marking the hottest year on record. Species extinction rates have accelerated to 100-1,000 times background levels, with iconic species like the Sumatran rhinoceros approaching extinction. Economic systems have inflated speculative bubbles in housing, technology, and cryptocurrencies while enriching the few and destroying the planet through resource depletion and pollution.
The numbers tell a stark story of growing inequality and stagnation. In many Western economies, real earnings have stagnated for decades while the profits-to-wages ratio has reached record highs. Between 1995 and 2013, OECD real median wages grew just 0.8% annually versus 1.5% for productivity, representing the largest decoupling of wages from productivity in modern history. Private wealth-to-income ratios doubled from 1970 to 2010, concentrating assets in fewer hands. Meanwhile, personal debt has ballooned to 150% of GDP in the US and over 200% in France and China, forcing many households to rely on credit just to maintain living standards.
Business practices have evolved toward minimal investment combined with short-term management and excessive shareholder rewards. CEO pay has skyrocketed from 20 times average worker pay in the 1980s UK to 129 times by 2016, while worker wages remained largely flat. Fortune 500 companies spent nearly $4 trillion on buybacks in the decade to 2019, with tech giants like Apple and Microsoft spending over 100% of net income on buybacks and dividends. Six major US airlines spent 96% of free cash flow on buybacks between 2010-2019, yet sought government bailouts during COVID-19, highlighting the dangers of prioritizing shareholders over operational resilience.
This obsession with shareholder value has loaded companies with unsustainable debt levels, making them extremely vulnerable to market downturns. Toys 'R' Us provides a cautionary tale - after a private equity takeover loaded it with debt, interest payments reached 97% of operating profit, leading to its eventual collapse and the loss of 30,000 jobs. Similar patterns have played out across retail, media, and manufacturing sectors. Meanwhile, the climate emergency represents an existential threat, with the IPCC warning of just ten years until irreversible breakdown. Recent studies indicate that critical tipping points like Arctic ice melt and Amazon rainforest die-off may be approaching faster than previously thought.
Why haven't we mobilized effectively to address these interconnected challenges? The answer lies in how we've fundamentally misconceived government's role in the economy. Rather than leading boldly as it did during the moonshot era, when government investment drove innovations from semiconductors to the internet, government has been relegated to merely fixing market failures rather than achieving ambitious societal objectives. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets actually work and how innovation occurs. Historical evidence shows that many breakthrough technologies, from GPS to touch screens, emerged from purposeful public investment rather than market forces alone.
Chapter 3
Debunking the Myths That Limit Government's Potential
Since the 1980s, government's role has been systematically diminished by five persistent myths that prevent mission-oriented approaches to our greatest challenges:
Myth 1: Businesses create value; governments only facilitate
The conventional narrative holds that value creation occurs exclusively within business, while government merely sets rules and fixes market failures. This ideology has led public institutions to lose both confidence and capability. The reality contradicts this narrative: government plays a massive role in value creation and risk-taking. Nearly every technology that makes smartphones "smart"-the internet, GPS, touch-screens, voice recognition-emerged from public funding. Similarly, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, renewable energy development, and innovation powerhouses in Taiwan, Israel, and South Korea all relied on ambitious public investment that absorbed risks the private sector avoided.
I'm reminded of Steve Jobs, often portrayed as the quintessential lone innovator. Yet his genius wasn't creating technologies from scratch but integrating publicly-funded innovations into user-friendly products. Without DARPA's internet, the Defense Department's GPS, and the National Science Foundation's touch-screen research, the iPhone simply wouldn't exist.
Myth 2: Government should only fix market failures
Economic theory assumes government can only fix markets, not create them. This view suggests government should intervene only when markets fail due to externalities or information asymmetries. In reality, government investment often "crowds in" private investment by absorbing uncertainties and long-term risks, stimulating funding that might not otherwise happen.
Consider the Human Genome Project-a $3.8 billion public investment that generated an estimated $796 billion in economic returns by 2013. Private genomics research flourished not despite but because of this public investment that created an entirely new market.
Myth 3: Government should run like a business
New Public Management introduced business-like practices into public administration in the 1980s. By treating public institutions as businesses, it transformed patients into "clients" and students into "customers." Static efficiency metrics like cost-benefit analysis struggle to capture the fundamental uncertainty and feedback loops involved in ambitious projects.
Imagine if NASA had used today's cost-benefit analysis for the Apollo program. The uncertain benefits would have been heavily discounted, making the massive upfront costs seem unjustifiable. We'd never have reached the moon, and the technological revolution it sparked might never have happened.
Myth 4: Outsourcing saves taxpayer money
The UK's Private Finance Initiative established partnerships with private companies to build and run public infrastructure. However, these 700+ PFI projects will ultimately cost the public 310 billion by 2047-48-five times the original capital outlay and typically 40% more expensive than government-financed alternatives.
Studies consistently show contractors cost significantly more than government employees-US federal contractors are paid 1.83 times more than federal employees. The reliance on consultants has hollowed out government capabilities and created inefficiencies. During COVID-19, the UK government paid BCG consultants up to 6,250 per day for the test-and-trace system rather than retraining staff as Germany did.
Myth 5: Government shouldn't pick winners
The idea that government shouldn't "pick winners" has become conventional wisdom, but this view misrepresents history. While failures like Solyndra's bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee are highlighted, successes like Tesla (which received $465 million in government loans the same year) are marketed as private-sector achievements.
The fundamental problem isn't occasional investment failures-that's normal in innovation-but rather "socializing risks and privatizing rewards." The government bears the costs of failures while getting none of the upside from successes.
Chapter 4
Lessons from Apollo: A Blueprint for Modern Missions
The Apollo program demonstrates six key attributes that could guide a new challenge-led political economy:
Vision with strong purpose: Kennedy's leadership provided not just an inspiring vision but a concrete purpose that galvanized widespread engagement. His Rice University speech acknowledged the enormous budget while emphasizing the program's far-reaching benefits: enriched science and education, new knowledge, techniques, tools, companies, and tens of thousands of jobs.
Modern missions addressing complex challenges like climate change demand even more dynamic citizen involvement than purely technological ones, both in defining missions and implementing them.
Risk-taking innovation: NASA embraced experimentation and failure as learning opportunities, using goal-oriented procurement policies that often provided no-strings funding to technical groups with broad guidance rather than dictating solutions.
During Eagle's descent to the lunar surface, a 1202 computer error appeared, but 23-year-old engineer John Garman identified it as a non-critical overload issue, allowing the landing to proceed safely within 27 seconds. This kind of split-second decision-making under pressure exemplifies the innovative culture NASA cultivated.
Organizational dynamism: NASA's success stemmed from decentralization, with delegation of authority to laboratories like JPL, and the ability to bypass bureaucratic procedures. NASA gave centers "what they needed to get the job done but not so much that their work would lose its relevance to the agency's mission."
Cross-sector collaboration: Apollo's public-private collaboration generated innovations across numerous sectors. The digital telecommunications system developed for the moon landing became the foundation for Motorola's future products. Other innovations emerged in food, medicine, materials, and safety equipment.
The program created new job categories, particularly for women programmers (called "computers") and African Americans like mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose story was depicted in "Hidden Figures."
Outcome-focused budgeting: While Apollo's expenditure faced scrutiny at the time, history has validated its value through technological spillovers that fueled the IT revolution. The final Apollo program cost was $25.8 billion ($260 billion in 2020 dollars), representing about 1.1% of federal outlays between 1959-1972.
For perspective, this was substantially less than interest payments on federal debt during the same period ($140.3 billion) and far less than the 2008 bank bailout.
Dynamic public-private partnerships: NASA didn't rely on consulting companies for project management but instead formed direct partnerships with innovative businesses through flexible procurement contracts. NASA balanced reliance on trusted companies with the need to maintain competition and alternatives.
Critically, NASA maintained strong internal expertise to effectively negotiate and manage these contracts. This internal knowledge prevented contractor capture and ensured intelligent partner selection.
Chapter 5
Applying Mission Thinking to Today's Grand Challenges
Unlike Apollo's purely technological challenge, today's problems are "wicked"-combining technological, social, political and behavioral factors. Richard Nelson's book "The Moon and the Ghetto" highlighted this paradox: while we can achieve technological feats like landing on the moon, we struggle with social problems where multiple factors intersect. This complexity is evident in issues like urban poverty, where solutions must address education, housing, healthcare, employment, and social mobility simultaneously.
The UN's Sustainable Development Goals provide an ideal framework for mission-oriented approaches, with 17 interconnected challenges from poverty to climate action. Each SDG contains specific targets that create a perfect structure for mission-oriented innovation. These goals are deliberately interconnected - progress on one goal often catalyzes improvements in others, creating positive feedback loops for sustainable development.
For example, SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) has three specific 2030 targets: universal access to affordable energy, substantially increased renewable energy share, and doubled energy efficiency improvement. These detailed targets provide clear direction for the many innovations and experiments needed to fulfill each mission. Success requires coordinated efforts across multiple domains - from technological innovation in solar and wind power to policy reforms in energy markets, and from infrastructure development to behavior change programs in communities.
A mission mapping framework begins by identifying a problem, framing it as a goal that catalyzes investment across sectors and inspires new collaborations. For "Climate Action" (SDG 13), a mission to build 100 carbon-neutral cities across Europe would drive innovations across mobility, governance, transport infrastructure, construction standards, and food systems. This would involve developing new building materials, redesigning urban transportation networks, implementing smart grid technologies, and creating innovative waste management solutions. Cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam are already pioneering such approaches, providing valuable learning opportunities.
Similarly, for "Life below Water" (SDG 14), a mission to rid oceans of plastic would require cross-sector collaboration spanning marine science, design, materials science, waste management, and behavioral psychology. This mission demands innovations in biodegradable packaging, improved recycling technologies, and waste collection systems, alongside public education campaigns and policy interventions. Successful initiatives like the Ocean Cleanup Project demonstrate how technological innovation combined with systemic thinking can address complex environmental challenges.
The key to success lies in breaking down these grand challenges into actionable missions with clear metrics and timelines. This approach allows for coordinated effort across public and private sectors, while maintaining flexibility in how solutions are developed and implemented. Examples like Tesla's impact on electric vehicle adoption or Denmark's wind power revolution show how mission-oriented thinking can drive transformative change across entire industries and societies.
Chapter 6
Selecting and Implementing Effective Missions
Effective missions must be bold and inspirational with wide societal relevance, directly improving people's daily lives while appealing to the imagination. They require clear direction with measurable, time-bound targets-whether binary (like landing on the moon) or quantifiable (reducing carbon emissions by 30% in five years). Modern examples include initiatives like eliminating plastic waste from oceans by 2040 or ensuring universal access to clean drinking water in developing nations by 2035.
The perfect mission balances ambition with feasibility-pushing innovation beyond normal boundaries while remaining achievable. It should spur research and innovation across multiple disciplines, sectors, and actor types by focusing on problems that enable system-wide transformation. For instance, the mission to develop autonomous vehicles requires advances in artificial intelligence, sensor technology, urban planning, and regulatory frameworks, while engaging automakers, tech companies, city planners, and policymakers.
DARPA exemplifies mission-driven government innovation, attracting top talent through purpose rather than salary alone. Its flexible, adaptive approach has produced transformative technologies like the internet and GPS by taking enormous risks with specific problems in mind. DARPA's success stems from its unique organizational structure: small, empowered teams with significant autonomy, limited-term appointments, and the ability to quickly pivot or terminate unsuccessful projects. Other notable DARPA innovations include stealth technology, voice recognition systems, and advanced robotics.
Successful mission implementation requires policy instruments focused on outcomes rather than specific firms, technologies, or sectors. Procurement contracts, grants, loans, and prize schemes should reward risk-taking that solves public problems. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative successfully reduced solar energy costs by 75% through a combination of research grants, public-private partnerships, and regulatory reforms.
Prize schemes have proven effective for centuries-from the 1675 Longitude Prize (which produced the marine chronometer) to today's 10 million prize for diagnostic tests to combat antibiotic resistance. The X Prize Foundation has catalyzed breakthroughs in private spaceflight, oil spill cleanup, and adult literacy through well-designed competitions. These schemes work by attracting diverse participants, encouraging unconventional approaches, and only rewarding success.
Missions require new governance approaches where public finance becomes an investor of first resort, not just lender of last resort. This means building institutional capabilities, redesigning procurement contracts, and creating a culture that embraces ambitious portfolios. Successful examples include Israel's Innovation Authority, which takes equity stakes in high-risk technology ventures, and Germany's KfW development bank, which helped finance the country's renewable energy transition. These institutions demonstrate how government can actively shape markets while sharing both risks and rewards.
To ensure mission success, organizations must develop clear metrics for progress, establish cross-sector coordination mechanisms, and maintain long-term commitment despite political cycles. Regular evaluation and adaptation of mission parameters helps maintain momentum while responding to changing circumstances and emerging opportunities.
Chapter 7
Three Critical Missions for Our Time
Mission: A Green New Deal
Greening the economy demands a moonshot-worthy mission that transforms production, distribution and consumption across the entire economy. Two significant green initiatives emerged in 2019: In the US, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey introduced a Green New Deal targeting elimination of all US carbon emissions through a "ten-year national mobilization." In Europe, Ursula von der Leyen launched the European Green Deal, aiming to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050.
For success, governments must redesign financial instruments-directing public banks toward green projects, using financial regulation to reward green banking, restructuring investment funds, and implementing carbon border mechanisms. The current pace of green transition demonstrates the failure of relying on carbon taxes and market forces alone.
Mission: Innovating for Accessible Health
A mission-oriented approach to health innovation focuses on production governance to achieve public health objectives. Despite massive public investment ($40 billion annually from NIH alone), drug prices remain prohibitively expensive. The hepatitis-C drug Sofosbuvir, developed with US government funding, was priced at $84,000 per treatment course by Gilead Sciences, generating over $50 billion in sales by 2017.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for mission-oriented health innovation became urgent. Despite substantial public investment in vaccine development, insufficient safeguards were implemented to ensure affordability and accessibility. Governments must transform innovation governance by establishing clear rules of engagement, prioritizing public health needs, promoting open knowledge exchange rather than secretive competition, and imposing conditions on public investments.
Mission: Narrowing the Digital Divide
Digital capability has become nearly a human right in today's world. The digital divide affects billions-21 million Americans lack internet access, 7% of UK households have no internet, and half the global population remains unconnected. This divide worsened during COVID-19 lockdowns, exposing deep inequalities in access to technology needed for remote education and work.
Past initiatives like Obama's ConnectED program and the 1980s BBC Computer Literacy Project demonstrate how government-led missions can drive technological innovation. The BBC project led to the development of the BBC Micro computer that reached nearly every British classroom and spawned companies like ARM Holdings, showing how mission-oriented procurement can foster business scaling while meeting public needs.
Chapter 8
Seven Principles for a New Political Economy
For mission-oriented approaches to succeed, we need both purposeful government and a different type of private sector that moves beyond profit maximization. Seven key pillars can guide this transformation:
Value: collectively created
Modern economics has lost its public purpose orientation by focusing on individual preference maximization. Rather than seeing public goods as merely filling market gaps, we should ask what common objectives they serve. Common goods result from collective imagination, investment and social movements.
Markets: shaping not fixing
Mission-oriented approaches require government to do much more than fix failures-they must imagine entirely new landscapes and catalyze investment by creating new markets. This "market shaping" approach asks what kinds of markets we want, focusing on both the quantity and quality of investment.
Organizations: dynamic capabilities
Both public and private organizations need dynamic capabilities for experimentation and learning. These capabilities differ from static operational ones by enabling organizations to develop knowledge resources and create longer-term competitive advantage through learning by doing.
Finance: outcomes-based budgeting
Missions require long-term thinking and patient finance. Modern Money Theory explains how government finance actually works: when a government issues its own currency, it first spends money into existence. The real constraint isn't "affordability" but inflation, which only becomes problematic when spending bumps against real resource limits.
Distribution: sharing risks and rewards
Since innovation involves collective risk-taking, the public sector should share in the rewards when investments succeed. This can happen through public wealth funds built from returns on government investments or through equity stakes in companies benefiting from public funding.
Partnership: purpose and stakeholder value
True partnerships between public and private actors must ensure fair relationships and public returns on public investments. Today's focus on stakeholder value counters short-termism by recognizing that value is collectively created and must be equitably distributed among all stakeholders-workers, communities, and environment-not just shareholders.
Participation: open systems to co-design our future
True participation requires bringing diverse voices to mission design, not just implementation, crossing class boundaries to address feelings of disenfranchisement. Systems must remain open to adaptation based on feedback, embedding experimentation and learning from differences rather than imposing top-down solutions.
Chapter 9
Transforming Our Future Through Mission Thinking
As Neil Armstrong looked back at Earth from the moon, he described our planet as "an oasis in a sea of darkness" needing protection. This perspective captures the essence of mission-oriented thinking-seeing our shared challenges from a new vantage point that reveals both their urgency and our capacity to address them collectively. Like the Apollo missions that united diverse teams, industries, and resources toward a common goal, today's global challenges demand similar coordinated effort and shared purpose.
The short-termism of businesses and sluggishness of government bureaucracies aren't predetermined-they result from chosen structures and relationships. Many corporations focus on quarterly earnings while governments often become mired in red tape and risk aversion. Transformative change requires governments to build internal capabilities, take calculated risks, and "pick the willing" partners rather than winners. This means fostering collaboration with organizations demonstrating commitment and capability, rather than simply selecting established industry leaders. Examples include partnerships between NASA and SpaceX, or Germany's green energy transition involving multiple stakeholders.
Beyond the simplistic austerity-versus-investment debate, mission-oriented thinking provides imagination for where and how to invest. Like Roosevelt's New Deal, which included not just infrastructure but artistic reimagining of public space through programs like the Works Progress Administration, today's challenges require new aesthetics and values that center human experience. This could mean designing cities for people rather than cars, creating circular economies that eliminate waste, or developing technologies that enhance rather than replace human capabilities.
As we face multiple overlapping crises-climate change, inequality, technological disruption, and pandemic recovery-the mission economy approach offers not just a policy framework but a fundamentally new way of thinking about what's possible. Success stories like Denmark's wind energy revolution or South Korea's rapid pandemic response demonstrate how purposeful public-private collaboration can drive innovation and achieve ambitious goals. By reimagining government as an innovative, entrepreneurial force and reconfiguring markets to serve public purpose, we can transform capitalism itself into a system capable of addressing our greatest challenges.
The question isn't whether we can afford these missions-it's whether we can afford not to pursue them. The costs of inaction on climate change alone far exceed the investments needed for transition to clean energy. As Kennedy said of the moonshot, these are acts of faith and vision that define who we are and what we might become. Just as the space program yielded countless innovations that improved life on Earth, today's missions to create sustainable, inclusive economies can generate solutions that benefit all of humanity. The future depends on our willingness to be as bold in addressing Earth's challenges as we once were in reaching for the stars.
