The Entrepreneurial State (book)

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, published in 2013, is Mazzucato's most influential and widely translated work. The book's central argument is that the dominant narrative of innovation — private entrepreneurs taking risks while government merely corrects market failures — is empirically false. Through forensic funding histories of the iPhone, the pharmaceutical industry, green technology, and the internet, Mazzucato demonstrates that the state has repeatedly functioned as an entrepreneurial investor, taking on high-risk, long-horizon research that the private sector refused and creating the conditions under which commercial application became viable. The returns from these investments have flowed almost entirely to private shareholders because the institutional architecture contains no mechanism for public return. The book's implications — that the state should participate in the upside of the investments it makes — have shaped innovation policy debates across the EU, UK, South Africa, and multiple Latin American economies.