Nesta and IIPP jointly launch new work on rethinking public value  

Nesta and the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) rethink the creation and evaluation of public value at a collaborative event.

Nesta and IIPP hosted an event at Nesta’s headquarters in London to launch new papers which explore and rethink public value in the 21st century. The event was chaired by Jonathan Breckon, the head of Nesta’s Alliance for Useful Evidence. Presenting to a full-house, IIPP Director Mariana Mazzucato and Nesta Chief Executive Geoff Mulgan spoke about how we have created and measured public value in the past, and why we need to rethink this approach in order to tackle the biggest societal challenges of our time. They were then followed by a discussion with Breckon and Josh Ryan-Collins, IIPP’s Head of Research.  

Mulgan opened the afternoon event with a summary of the complexities of measuring public value, drawing from Nesta’s paper Public Value: How can it be measured, managed and grown? The Nesta report looked at how we can accurately map and measure the value of bicycle lanes or museums, our mental wellbeing or even fresh air and how we incorporate collective value creation into government tools and policies.

Drawing from IIPP’s latest policy brief, Getting serious about public value, and our latest working paper, Putting value creation back into 'public value, Mazzucato took the stage and first outlined the limits of the market failure approach to guiding public action and then laid out a dynamic framework for market co-creation guided by achieving public value. She drew from real life examples such as the work IIPP has done on missions for the European Commission, the IIPP-hosted Commission for Mission-Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy, and IIPP’s upcoming Masters programme in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value which aims to train future leaders in new ways to create, practice and measure public value in order to work towards common societal goals. 

If you want to learn more about rethinking public value, you can read the recently launched IIPP papers and Nesta report below:

• Read our latest policy brief, Getting serious about public value written by Mariana Mazzucato and Rainer Kattel
• Read our later working paper, Putting value creation back into 'public value': From market-fixing to market-shaping by Mariana Mazzucato and Josh Ryan-Collins
• Learn about the IIPP MPA programme on Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value
• Read Nesta’s report, Public Value: How can it be measured, managed and grown?

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