85no price for being wrong and it struggles in assigning responsibility. Missions are motivated by a false dichotomy: that there is a difference in principle between ﬁxing and creating markets. This premise is splitting hairs at best. Instead, what sets missions apart, other than sheer ambition, is a shift from bottom-up to top-down approaches to knowledge creation. Missions are most likely to achieve intended ends when reasonable people agree on the problem, what needs to be done, and when responsibility can be assigned. Even then, opportunity costs are ignored. The entrepreneurial state is currently pushing to solve those issues where it is likely to do the least good and the most harm: where we lack the knowledge of what to do, where accountability is unassigned, and where the failure-success axis cannot be meaningfully assessed. Successful mission policy further requires politics well beyond what democratic systems can achieve.

Keywords Mission-oriented innovation · Innovation · Entrepreneurship

1 Introduction

Calls for the state to act entrepreneurially are currently permeating innovation policy in large parts of the world. But what does it really mean to be an entrepreneur in a system of innovation, and further, for the state to act out that role? Those are, in a nutshell, the questions posed in this chapter. Before we turn to state entrepreneurship and its corollary, mission-oriented innovation policy, we need to grapple with the

J. P. Larsson (*) Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: jpl66@cam.ac.uk