Un articolo su American Affairs Journals recensisce il libro di un trio di accademici – Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler ed Erkki Karo – che, basandosi sul lavoro di Mariana Mazzucato, difendono il ruolo dello Stato nell’innovazione. I problemi che dobbiamo affrontare oggi sembrano richiedere, agli occhi di molti osservatori, un maggiore ruolo dello Stato. Gli autori però sostengono che, per questo scopo, bisogna ripensare anche come la burocrazia pubblica gestisce l’innovazione.

Liberals are frustrated that the United States can’t build public transportation or deploy clean energy fast enough. Conservatives are increasingly interested in industrial policy to counter a rising China. Congress just passed massive science funding, infrastructure, and climate packages and is banking on the administrative state to effectively implement them. A high-inflation macroenvironment has heightened the awareness of supply-side bottlenecks across the economy and turned dredging and port automation into headline grabbers. Public intellectuals like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are writing about the importance of a liberalism that builds and the need for an “abundance agenda.” Nearly everyone is disappointed with how our public health agencies handled the Covid-19 pandemic (even as they disagree about what went wrong).

Il libro descrive a fondo i vari sistemi burocratici che, nel corso degli anni e in giro per il mondo, hanno sostenuto l’innovazione. Tuttavia, secondo il recensore, manca un’analisi di come costruire una struttura efficiente di questo tipo. In particolare, se gli autori sostengono che il modello della “distruzione creativa” proposta da Joseph Schumpeter non sia adatto al settore pubblico, l’articolo ritiene che si possa comunque ottenere qualcosa di simile creando nuove strutture all’interno delle organizzazioni esistenti. Altre strategie potrebbero essere la creazione di enti pubblici preposti solo a testare diverse soluzioni, e la promozione di obiettivi pratici e operativi, all’interno delle agenzie pubbliche di ricerca.

The book is at its strongest when describing the evolution and transformation of various “innovation bureaucracies” across time and around the world. While digging into historical examples like the original Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova, the authors surface certain themes that repeat across case studies: the need for flexible hiring rules, the importance of attracting a nation’s best and brightest into public service, and the significance of overarching “missions” to focus the public sector.

A unifying theme discussed throughout the book is the idea of “agile stability” for state bureaucracies: the tension between ensuring stability in the core functions that they provide to the public while also maintaining the flexibility to evolve and add new capabilities over time. Nevertheless, the book is frustrating in its lack of practical detail as to how agencies can embed agility into their functions or how to structurally enable bureaucratic actors to take risks. But the fundamental question is an essential one for our current moment, and the book can help point us in the right direction.