353Absent natural experiments offering reliable identification, what researchers can do effectively is to observe patterns, and judge these patterns according to what essentially amounts to an aesthetic standard (Klein, 2012). When it comes to mission-oriented innovation policy, our view is that reasonable people can disagree on this standard. Mazzucato (2018, p. 805) argues that missions,

should be feasible, draw on existing public and private resources, be amenable to existing

policy instruments, and command broad and continuous political support. Missions should

create a long-term public agenda for innovation policies, address a societal demand or need,

and draw on the high potential of the country’s science and technology system to develop

innovations. Her subsequent list of key lessons (section 3 of her article, pp. 805–809) is summarized as a new approach to policymaking (p. 809) and contrasts her approach with an older approach to missions-oriented projects (based on the so-called Maastricht Memorandum). We use her lessons as titles for the following six subsections, addressing each of them in turn. The purpose is not to refute them (although sometimes we will), but to see what insights can be yielded by seeing them through the CIB perspective.

4.1

From Picking Winners to Picking the Willing

Deciding on a mission is about deciding that a transformation of society must be made, implying that choices must be made. This, in Mazzucato’s view, is not about picking winners, but rather about “picking the willing: those organizations across the economy (in different sectors, including both the public and private sphere) that are ‘willing’ to engage with a societally relevant mission” (Mazzucato, 2018, p. 806). Can this be considered as anything other than semantics, substituting one word for another in order to make corporate handouts sound more palatable? We struggle to see how. Here, the CIB’s spotlight on actors’ interactions is helpful for understanding how and why entrepreneurial plans are reformulated, revised, or even abandoned over