359Collaborative Innovation Blocs and Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy: An. . .

STEM-education policies) (Bloom et al., 2019). CIB effects from such efforts primarily accrue to two actor categories: inventors and key employees. Ideally, these skill pools should see an increase both in their breadth and their depth, to the benefit of the entire CIB. However, this consequence rests on the assumption that the skill pools did not already have sufficient breadth and depth, a debatable empirical fact, to say the least. As pointed out by Lucas (2019) in an article arguing that the CIB perspective needs public choice, actors thus supported are likely to become a politically relevant interest, using their power to suck up resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. Making a particular type of key personnel less scarce than it should be could fundamentally alter entrepreneurs’ calculus when putting together a collaborative team, skewing things away from what would be “desirable” in the non-subsidized case. As Bhidé (2008, pp. 150–151) puts it, “the commercial success of innovations turns not just on the attributes of the product or know-how, but on the effectiveness and efficiency of the innovator’s sales and marketing process.” The result may be too much knowledge generation at the expense of knowledge exploitation or diffusion, too great a reliance on technological innovations relative to process innovations, or too much focus on product development with too little effort put into marketing and sales. Or, maybe the intervention achieves the optimum level of the skill pool in order to achieve as great an innovation output as possible. The counterfactual is