MAZZUCATO AND HER COLLEAGUES call for ambitious, “mission-oriented” industrial policy with system-wide, cross-sectoral investment in contrast to the narrower task of prioritizing a particular industry. A significant part of this effort involves investment in science and innovation. However, the U.S. science and innovation system already has extensive mission-orientation, which could easily support the examples of missions that Mazzucato offers. What we need in the United States, and around the world, are technology strategies across national objectives.
Unlike firms, nations have multiple objectives: national security, economic prosperity (including jobs), and social welfare (including health, environment, and equity). In the past the United States has pursued the technological component of each objective through science and technology agencies with singular missions, such as defense, energy, transportation, commerce, and labor. The National Research Council beautifully describes how this mix of missions helped create the revolution in computing: “By funding a mix of work in universities and industry, [the United States] was able to marry long-term objectives to real-world problems. And, by channeling its funding through a variety of federal agencies, it was able to ensure broad-based coverage of many technological approaches and to address a range of technical problems.” Yet this excellent system has a hole: even if each agency (or program within an agency) perfectly fulfills its own narrowly specified mission, the country could still fail to fulfill the nation’s overarching multi-objective goal. In other words, the current system could put objectives such as national security, trade, and competitiveness with China into conflict with other significant objectives such as jobs and social welfare.