UCL IIPP Research is the winner of the 2023 George R. Terry Book Award

We are delighted to announce that the book How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy, authored by Rainer Kattel, IIPP Deputy Director, Wolfgang Drechsler, professor of governance and IIPP Honorary professor, and Erkki Karo, director and professor at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn University of Technology, has won the 2023 George R. Terry Book Award of the Academy of Management. 

This prestigious award is granted annually to the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years.

In reviewing the book, the award committee noted that it draws from classic and contemporary organization theory, economic sociology, and political economy to move away from the prevailing narrative of the state as a passive facilitator of private sector innovation. Instead, the book proposes a new model of the "entrepreneurial state" - a state that actively invests in and coordinates innovation and entrepreneurship through a variety of means, including direct investment, public procurement, policy, and strategic partnerships with private actors. 

This year’s committee membership included: Julian M. Birkinshaw, London Business School; Todd Bridgman, Victoria University of Wellington; Tiziana Casciaro, University of Toronto; Matteo Cristofaro, University of Rome Tor Vergata; Mattia Gilmartin (Chair), New York University; and Paula Jarzabkowski, The University of Queensland.

In receiving this award, the authors said:

“It is great to see renewed and wide interest in rethinking the state and its role in shaping capitalist economies for fairer outcomes and in how public organisations play a critical role in this,” said IIPP Deputy Director Prof. Rainer Kattel

“We are particularly pleased that this is a general management award, which is rarely enough won by a public management book, and we are glad that it honors a collaboration that is based both in Tallinn and in London,” said IIPP Honorary Prof. Wolfgang Drechsler

“This is a genuine team effort, and we are glad that our thesis of agile stability as a requirement for innovation bureaucracies has been taken up as a significant boost to administrative organizations generally,” said Prof. Erkki Karo.

In congratulating the authors, UCL IIPP Founding Director Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who wrote the preface to the book, said:

“This prize is fully deserved for a book set to transform how global governments—at every level—radically rethink how to transform their organisations”.