Professor Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) holds the Chair in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value and is Founder and Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London (UCL). She previously held the RM Phillips Chair at SPRU, University of Sussex and has held academic positions at the University of Denver, the London Business School, Bocconi University and the Open University.
Her research focuses on the relationship between financial markets, innovation, and economic growth—and how to ensure smart, innovation-led growth is also more inclusive and sustainable. She is particularly interested in rethinking the way in which public and private actors can work together more symbiotically, and how public investments can be directed at cross-sectoral ‘missions’ that require bottom up experimentation.
Her highly acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem, 2013; updated US edition, Public Affairs, 2015) was on the 2013 Books of the Year list of the Financial Times. It focuses on the need to develop new frameworks to understand the role of the state in economic growth—and how to enable rewards from innovation to be just as ‘social’ as the risks taken.
Professor Mazzucato is winner of the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy, the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis ; and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. In 2013 she was named as one of the '3 most important thinkers about innovation' in the New Republic.
She is co-editor of a new book, Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Wiley Blackwell, July 2016). Her new book The Value of Everything, will be published by Penguin (Allen Lane) in 2018.
She has advised policy makers around the world on innovation-led growth and is currently a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors; a member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network Leadership Council, and SITRA’s (the Finnish Innovation Fund) Advisory Panel. She is currently Special Advisor for the EC Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas.
Her recent research includes projects funded by the European Commission, the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and work commissioned by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Brazilian Ministry for Science and Technology. Between 2009-2012 she was the scientific director of a large 3-year European Commission FP7 funded project on Finance, Innovation and Growth (FINNOV).
Her research outputs, media engagement (including articles in the FT, Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Guardian and Foreign Affairs), and talks (including her TED Global talk), can be found on her website.
Mariana Mazzucato is a Global Fellow in the Global Fellows and Clean Innovation Research Program
