“Growth is not the mission. Growth is the result if we get missions right.”
The Academy was delighted to welcome Professor Mariana Mazzucato FAcSS in delivering the Academy’s 2025 Annual Lecture on the topic of “mission-oriented” growth.
In a wide-ranging and inspiring online talk, Mariana drew on her research to illustrate how a mission-oriented approach to policy can stimulate and direct inclusive and sustainable growth whilst addressing the grand challenges of our time. Specifically, she focused on what it means to take mission-oriented government seriously, including the challenges facing the UK in designing mission-oriented policy, the importance of a cross-sectoral and bottom-up approach to catalysing innovation to reach ‘mission-accomplished’ and redesigning the tools of governance to break down siloes.
Mariana began by highlighting the importance of placing missions at the centre of how we understand the economy and finance, distinguishing that growth is an outcome of missions if we achieve them and that growth cannot be a mission in and of itself. She used the example of climate change to explain that by confusing missions with growth, then that results in a false dichotomy where there appears to be a choice to be made between tackling the challenge (e.g. net zero) and growth, when in fact growth is the result of having objectives which require public and private investment.
She said, “Missions have the opportunity, if done right, to catalyse a wave of public and private sector investment. And the fact that in this country, the UK, we remain very low in terms of business investment, I think we’re currently 28th in the OECD in terms of business investment, there’s a real opportunity to drive public and private sector investment around goals around health, the digital divide, around net zero, maybe water related missions.”
Mariana went on to explore the challenges in the UK to enabling mission-oriented policies and government, including a financial sector which reinvests the majority of its finance back into finance, insurance and real estate; a trend in corporate governance structure to prioritise short term gains over long term investment; and a public sector which has patchy policy to fill gaps that the private sector is not doing or address market failures.
She said, “A lot of the vocabulary that we have actually used to describe what the public sector is for really needs to change – not a lender of last resort, but an investor or first resort, not a market fixer, but a market shaper.”
Mariana used the example of NASA’s mission to reach the moon as a way to exemplify how to design mission-oriented policy. She explained how NASA changed the tools they were using to be problem-oriented, that there were to be no excess profits created, so that value was being shared, and working well together to solve problems in different sectors and areas to reach the overall objective of getting to the moon.
She said, “Going to the moon was not just aerospace. It was as much solving how would the astronauts eat? How would they go to the bathroom? What would they wear literally, the material? Solving the climate problem today is obviously not just about energy. It’s how do we build? How do we move? Sustainable mobility. What do we wear? So on and so forth. So the solutions to all these problems got us innovations not because they [NASA] were obsessing about technology or innovations, but they were obsessing about the problems at hand.”
Mariana went on to explain how she believes that designing missions requires a cross-sectoral and bottom-up approach to catalyse innovation and experimentation in order for them to be achieved. She also highlighted the importance of missions in providing glue and cohesion, so that many projects are working towards one overall goal and therefore the sum becomes greater than the parts. Mariana used the example of how to take a missions approach to the hydrological cycle and create a revolution in the food system, to create a circular water economy and how this would require investment across sectors.
She commented, “At the minimum, recycling industrial waste water is actually about stimulating an investment strategy, it’s not just about protecting the planet. It then requires investment in innovation and that’s the point. By having missions like cutting leakages and non-revenue water in half by 2030, it requires investment in all sorts of different sectors and those bottom-up projects.”
Mariana then moved on to what a mission-oriented approach meant for institutions, and used the example of her work with Camden Council to illustrate how it’s possible to shift to an outcome-oriented procurement process for adult social care and including the stakeholders in that process to ensure public value could be measured. She also touched on the idea of a new social contract and what good partnership means in terms of reciprocity, the importance of co creating missions through participation processes, and the need to build stronger public sector capabilities to work well with others.
Before the Q&A session, Mariana closed on a final thought, “Ultimately the biggest missions are global. We can’t have climate nationalism, like we couldn’t have vaccine nationalism, and using these events and these conferences [COP30, G20 South Africa and Financing for Development] and what the leaders are saying to also hold the system accountable, that we really recognise that many of our problems are global in nature.”
You can watch the full lecture below.