61(R&D) and innovation is argued to be necessary to handle a number of these challenges simultaneously. Policymakers, journalists, and some academics argue that more government involvement here can both curb the dominance of the tech superstars (Dans, 2021), reduce inequality (Keeley, 2015), and provide needed research into how climate change is best handled (Pew Research Center, 2020).

2.1

The Entrepreneurial State

Mazzucato’s (2011) account of the “entrepreneurial state” starts from the wellknown idea that private companies are often reluctant to invest in technologies with long-term, highly uncertain returns. State actors, free from the profitability requirements imposed by private capital markets, can pursue a variety of innovative projects unattractive to market participants. Sometimes, those investments can pay off, at which point private players enter the arena and manage the technology development process to commercialize the technological outcomes and monetize the investment. In other words, some commercially viable technologies typically emerge out of prior government investment in nascent projects that were not attractive to private investors. It does not follow, however, that state investment in particular technologies generates net gains; for that, we would need a systematic analysis of the entire portfolio of state projects rather than sampling on the dependent variable. Nonetheless, examples popularized by Mazzucato such as the internet, GPS, and nanotechnology have been used to promote a more general, activist role for the state in