359muddy, which is precisely the point. In complex, interconnected systems, even relatively targeted, relatively limited interventions can have far-reaching, unforeseen repercussions.

4.5

Engagement

Next, Mazzucato (2018, p. 808f) argues against an older view of missions where stakeholders are fewer in number and things are, generally, less democratic: “Understanding how the definition of missions can be opened up to a wider group of stakeholders, . . . is a key area of interest,” she states, and this “is tied to rethinking the notion of public value” as opposed to pure economic notions of “public good.” We willingly acknowledge this point. Democratically elected public officials and their bureaucrats should take the will of their citizenry into account, meaning mission-oriented innovation policy should reflect principles of democracy and inclusion rather than autocracy and exclusion.

However (returning to our point in Sect. 4.2), the state taking on the role of buyer in a mission-oriented project puts the question of precisely who the innovation generating system is for under scrutiny. A normative underpinning of the CIB perspective is that innovations should increase prosperity and the quality of life of a country’s citizens, with buying and selling and foregoing other options being an obvious way for those citizens, in their role as consumers, to express what they value at a specific point in time. Introducing the state as a middleman to interpret the will of citizens seems a roundabout way of achieving this goal, even when democratic N. Elert and M. Henrekson

360checks and balances are present. Again, this may be an issue of aesthetics, on which reasonable people can agree. Still, as we have stressed, sometimes the whole point of a mission-oriented project may be that the bureaucrat should have different preferences than citizens qua consumers, promoting the next generation of solar energy or other things that cannot (yet) survive in a private market but are deemed valuable in some other sense. Does this mean that mission-oriented innovation projects derive some of their value from not taking their citizens (short-term? irrational?) preferences into account? We are unsure. Saying that values other than those that can be expressed in monetary terms “matter” can be an easy way out for people wishing to promote their pet project. Alternatively, it could reveal thoughtful criticism of the present day’s “post-modern” sclerosis where the only acceptable criterion to gauge success, paradoxically, has become the corporate bottom-line. Failing to consider economic realities—market forces, CIB collaborations, etc.—when planning a project is, in our view, tantamount to ignoring gravity when building a bridge, but it is not the only thing that should be considered. It is an entirely different matter to distill what the public wants (or what it does not want but needs!), i.e., to weigh these “other things” and aggregate them in a manner that leaves everyone better off. Possibly, Mazzucato’s reaching out to a wider group of stakeholders is a way to do this, but who can be sure they do not end up as rent-seekers striving to get as big a part of the mission-oriented pie as possible? Sometimes, a thin line separates public interest