PERSON
Mariana Mazzucato (Life)
Italian-American economist (b. 1968), founder of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, whose work on the entrepreneurial state, value creation, and mission-oriented innovation has reshaped debates over industrial strategy.
Mariana Mazzucato (1968–present) is an Italian-American economist and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, where she founded and directs the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Born in Rome and raised in the United States, she studied at Tufts University and the New School for Social Research before holding academic positions at the University of Denver and the University of Sussex. Her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State fundamentally challenged the prevailing narrative that private enterprise drives innovation while government merely corrects market failures, documenting with granular precision the public funding behind technologies from the internet to the iPhone. Her subsequent works — The Value of Everything (2018) and Mission Economy (2021) — developed frameworks for distinguishing value creation from value extraction and for organizing public investment around ambitious societal missions. Her research program on algorithmic rents, conducted with Tim O'Reilly and Ilan Strauss, applies her analytical framework to platform monopolies and AI.