88cohesion agenda. Across nations, we face a macrocosm of the same problem. Our Innovation Without Entrepreneurship: The Pipe Dream of Mission-Oriented. . .

89national-political innovation systems are not built for this development, just as our political systems are not. In fact, the only man-made entities that act efficiently across borders are armed forces and multinational firms.

5

Concluding Remarks: Can Missions Work?

This chapter has analyzed the innovation machines within our societies, making a case that the entrepreneur is, next to human capital, its most integral part. I have also argued that those market forces that spur and fetter entrepreneurs do not translate in any simple way to the realities of the state. A firm that is hijacked by a bad idea suffers financially. A state that is hijacked by a bad idea is unlikely to suffer by any parameters it cares about. It might even find parameters by which it appears successful and tout its success. The most recent call for the state to be entrepreneurial involves so-called missionoriented innovation policies: the mobilization of great resources across many sectors to solve a great problem or act on an opportunity. Missions suffer from three overarching weaknesses. First, we do not know how to pick them or operationalize them. Second, we do not know how to evaluate their successes and failures, and it is likely that we will never be able to do so in a satisfactory way, since the opportunity costs are incredibly complex. Third, it is difficult to make an actual flesh-and-blood person accountable, which greatly increases the risk that an unproductive, or even destructive, project is initiated, as well as supported past its due date.

Sometimes a simple answer is not simplistic. In his famous 1977 book, The Moon and the Ghetto, Richard R. Nelson asked how it came to be that humankind managed to put a man on the moon but could not help ghetto kids read. It is of course a hopeful proposition that resources and political willpower are the missing pieces, as embodied in the call for missions. But when Nelson reflected back on his book almost 35 years later (Nelson, 2011, p. 685), he recalled that a central argument of the book, and something he considered still central to things we could not do, was “not so much political, as a consequence of the fact that, given existing knowledge, there were no clear paths to a solution.” With problems for which what to do is reasonably straightforward, it is obvious who the experts are, we can draw on already well-developed knowledge in science and private enterprises, and there is currently a lack of critical mass, missions may work in theory. The question is how many problems of significant importance fit those criteria. We must also figure out how these things interact with the institutional-technological issues of our time. Hammurabi could not have flown to the moon, but he is likely to have been able to fix a few issues with readability in