The Innovative State

We have always said it: the public-private contrast is wrong. Just as it is wrong to believe that the private is better than the public. First of all, because the private individual does another job than that of pursuing the common good; moreover, because even the private sector is not exempt from corruption and scandals, both in the profit and non-profit fields.
It's true: the word "public" has lost all positive connotations, becoming synonymous with waste, inefficiency, corruption. Nonetheless, the public cannot be replaced by the private.
The economist Mariana Mazzucato, professor of Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), explains it well in her book "The entrepreneurial State", with illuminating data:
"Innovation processes in any sector are characterized by the indispensable long time horizon and the high risk of failure (...) This is why you have to be "a little crazy" to engage in innovation: because it often costs more of what it yields and, therefore, if we were based on the traditional cost-benefit analysis, we would not even begin." But when Steve Jobs, in his famous lectio magistrale at Stanford, invited innovators to remain hungry and foolish, few underlined that the foolishness of which the Apple owner spoke had ridden the wave of innovations financed and directed by the public sector.
Such radical investments, involving a very high level of uncertainty, did not happen thanks to venture capitalists or garage inventors. It was the invisible hand of the state that embodied these innovations. Innovations that would not exist if we had to wait for the market or companies to think about them. After all, the country that is often held up as an example of the benefits of the free market system – the USA – has one of the most interventionist governments in the world when it comes to innovation”.
This is why for us it is a mission to ensure that the public system returns to the level of its role: the common good, which today means innovating, and therefore developing.