Mission-Oriented Policy Hub
The IIPP Mission-Oriented Policy Hub builds on the institute’s seven years of global work with governments to shape what mission-oriented statecraft looks like in practice.
The world is facing immense challenges around climate change, health inequities, and digital disruption. The question is how to transform these challenges into opportunities for the public and private sectors to invest, innovate, and collaborate like they have never done before. This economic activity can lead to inclusive and sustainable growth with the rewards being shared equitably between all economic actors.
The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) argues for a new 21st-century approach to industrial and innovation policy, placing public value creation at the heart of policymaking and emphasising the need for governments to shape and co-create markets, not just fix them. Through well-defined goals, or ‘missions’, policymakers can determine the direction of growth, coordinate action across different ministries and sectors, and shape new markets, industrial landscapes, and national innovation systems.
The IIPP Mission-Oriented Policy Hub builds on the institute’s seven years of global work with governments to shape what mission-oriented statecraft looks like in practice. It offers an overview of the institute’s work with government partners—on opportunities ranging from healthy and sustainable housing estates in Camden Council to the ecological transition in Brazil—that are advancing new approaches to bring economic, social, and environmental policy goals into alignment at the centre of their growth strategies.
Key Reports on Mission-Oriented Policy
Explore six essential publications offering practical insights and strategies on mission-oriented industrial policy, water governance, economic transformation, and the tools governments need to deliver change globally.
Mission-oriented industrial strategy: global insights
Practical insights from global work on aligning economic, social and environmental goals through mission-oriented industrial strategy, with tools to deliver change.
A Mission-Oriented Approach to Governing Our Global Water Challenges
This brief urges mission-driven policies to tackle the global water crisis through justice-centred actions on food, habitats, circular economy, water use, and sanitation.
Mission Economy
Mariana Mazzucato argues we must rethink government’s role and capacities to tackle grand challenges and restore public purpose in the economy and society.
A Mission-Oriented Strategy for Inclusive and Sustainable Economic Growth in Barbados
This report outlines how Barbados can centre sustainability and inclusion in economic policy through whole-government coordination, building public sector capacity, mission tools and engagement.
State Transformation in Brazil
This report examines Brazil’s economic and state transformation, focusing on public procurement, SOEs, and digital infrastructure to support mission-driven growth and sustainability.
Designing and implementing mission-oriented policies: Tools and resources from the field
This report reviews global tools and toolkits supporting the design, implementation, and evaluation of mission-oriented policies.
Missions and Mission-Oriented Policy Explained
Mission-oriented industrial and innovation policy offers a new approach to achieving directed economic growth. Instead of focusing on sectors, technologies, or firms (the “old” industrial policy), a mission-oriented approach begins by identifying the most pressing societal challenges that require system-wide transformation before breaking them down into manageable policy pathways. Governments can organize production, distribution, and consumption patterns across various sectors to deliver on these priorities. For example, to tackle the climate crisis, a green industrial policy can help transform every sector in our economy, from mining and energy to transportation and manufacturing. Growth is not the mission, it is the outcome of well-designed mission-oriented policies that catalyse new public and private sector investment and galvanise economy-wide innovation.
Getting Missions Right - Key Criteria
This means making sure that missions are fostering cross-sectoral innovation, collaboration and bottom-up experimentation. To achieve this, missions can follow five key criteria:
- Be bold, inspirational with wide societal relevance: Missions can help engage the public. They make clear that through ambitious, bold action, solutions can be developed that can have an impact on people’s daily lives.
- Set a clear direction — targeted, measurable, and time-bound: Missions need to be very clearly framed. Specific targets can help enable long-term investments, and these can either be formulated in binary ways (as clearly as whether man has reached the Moon and returned back safely) or quantified (as clearly as whether a certain percentage reduction in carbon emissions against a baseline has been reached across manufacturing).
- Be ambitious but realistic: Mission objectives should be set in an ambitious manner (taking risks), centred on research and innovation activities across the entire innovation chain, including the feedback effects between basic and applied research.
- Encourage cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and cross-actor innovation: Framed in a cross-sectoral way, missions can spark activity across, and among, multiple scientific disciplines (including social sciences and humanities), across different industrial sectors (e.g. transport, nutrition, health, services), and different types of actors (public, private, third sector, civil society organisations).
- Involve multiple, bottom-up solutions: Societal missions are not achievable by a single development path, or by a single technology- and instead can help crowd in different types of solutions.
Case studies / Global Partnerships
Europe’s mission for a plastic-free ocean (2018)
Barbados’s mission to tackle the climate crisis (2023)
A Mission-Oriented Strategy for Inclusive and Sustainable Economic Growth in Barbados
A mission-oriented approach to housing (2023)
The right to housing: A mission-oriented and human rights-based approach
- Starmer needs optimism to beat the black hole — not fear | The Times | Mariana Mazzucato
- Policy With A Purpose | F&D Magazine | Mariana Mazzucato
- Britain needs to grow again | The New Statesman | Mariana Mazzucato
- To succeed, Keir Starmer needs to be much more than “business friendly”: Labour should forge a new settlement that prioritises the common good over private profit | The New Statesman | Mariana Mazzucato
- The star economist who inspired Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘missions’: Mariana Mazzucato on her interventionist arguments Labour plans to enact | The Telegraph | Matt Olivier
- This is a bold opportunity to refocus Australia’s economy | Financial Review | Mariana Mazzucato
- What Mission-Driven Government Means | Project Syndicate | Mariana Mazzucato and Rainer Kattel
- Latin America’s private sector is failing the region, economist Mazzucato warns: UCL professor and consultant criticises ‘parasitic’ relationship between business and state | Financial Times | Michael Stott
- Biden’s Incomplete Industrial Policy : How to Finish Building an Economy That Works for Everyone | Foreign Affairs | Mariana Mazzucato and Sarah Doyle
- A Progressive Green Growth Narrative | Project Syndicate | Mariana Mazzucato
- Industrial strategy demands a new deal with the private sector | Financial Times | Mariana Mazzucato
- How to Make the Green Economy a Just Economy: Lessons From the U.S. Autoworkers’ Strike | Foreign Affairs | Mariana Mazzucato and Damon Silvers
- The inclusive entrepreneurial state: collective wealth creation and distribution | Mariana Mazzucato | Forthcoming
- Beyond Outsourcing: Re-embedding the State in Public Value Production | Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington | Forthcoming
- Extending the Sustainable Development Goals to 2050 – a road map | Mariana Mazzucato, Francesco Fuso Nerini, Johan Rockström, Harro van Asselt, Jim W. Hall, Stelvia Matos, Åsa Persson, Benjamin Sovacool, Ricardo Vinuesa and Jeffrey Sachs | 2024
- Measuring the macroeconomic responses to public investment in innovation: evidence from OECD countries | Mariana Mazzucato, Giovanna Ciaffi and Matteo Deleidi | 2024
- Governing the economics of the common good : from correcting market failures to shaping the economy to meet bold objectives | Mariana Mazzucato | 2023
- ARPA-H Could Offer Taxpayers a Fairer Shake | Mariana Mazzucato and Travis Whitfill | 2023
- Mapping modern economic rents: the good, the bad and the grey areas | Mariana Mazzucato, Josh Ryan-Collins and Griorgos Gouzoulis | 2023
- Mission-Oriented Policies and the ‘Entrepreneurial State’ at Work: An Agent-Based Exploration | Mariana Mazzucato, Giovanni Dosi, Francesco Lamperti, Mauro Napoletano and Andrea Roventini | 2023
- Collective value creation: a new approach to stakeholder value | Mariana Mazzucato | 2022
- Financing the Green New Deal | Mariana Mazzucato | 2022
- Putting value creation back into ‘public value’: From market-fixing to market-shaping | Mariana Mazzucato and Josh Ryan-Collins | 2022
- Industrial policies and the competition for low-carbon manufacturing | Gregor Semieniuk | 2022
- Public Purpose | Mariana Mazzucato | 2021
- Bringing Production Back into Development: An introduction | Antonio Andreoni | 2021
- Directed innovation policies and the supermultiplier: An empirical assessment of mission-oriented policies in the US economy | Mariana Mazzucato and Matteo Deleidi | 2021
- Grand Challenges, Industrial Policy and Public Value | Rainer Kattel and Mariana Mazzucato | 2020 Industrial Policy in the 21st Century | Antonio Andreoni | 2020
- Challenge-Driven Innovation Policy: Towards a New Policy Toolkit | Mariana Mazzucato, Rainer Kattel and Josh Ryan-Collins | 2020
- Socializing the risks and rewards of public investments: Economic, policy, and legal issues | Mariana Mazzucato and Andrea Laplane | 2020
- The green transition: public policy, finance and the role of the State | Mariana Mazzucato, Francesco Lamperti, Andrea Roventini and Gregor Semieniuk | 2019
- Putting austerity to bed: Technical progress, aggregate demand and the supermultiplier | Mariana Mazzucato and Matteo Deleidi | 2019
- The evolution of mission-oriented policies: Exploring changing market creating policies in the US and European space sector | Mariana Mazzucato and Douglas K.R. Robinson | 2019
- Mission Oriented Innovation Policy: Challenges and Opportunities | Mariana Mazzucato | 2018
- Mission-oriented innovation policy and dynamic capabilities in the public sector | Mariana Mazzucato and Rainer Kattel | 2018
- From Market Fixing to Market-Creating: A new framework for innovation policy | Mariana Mazzucato | 2016
- Which Industrial Policy Does Europe Need? | Mariana Mazzucato | 2015
- Industrial Policy with Conditionalities: A Taxonomy and Sample Cases | Mariana Mazzucato and Dani Rodrik | 3 October 2023
- How can South Africa advance a new energy paradigm? A mission-oriented approach to megaprojects | Antonio Andreoni, Kenneth Creamer, Mariana Mazzucato and Grové Steyn | 21 March 2022
- Governing finance to support the net-zero transition: Lessons from successful industrialisations | Olga Mikheeva and Josh Ryan-Collins | 21 January 2022
- Lesson from the past 21st century systems of state-owned enterprises | Simone Gasperin | 15 April 2021
- Deindustrialisation reconsidered: Structural shifts and sectoral heterogeneity | Fiona Tregenna and Antonio Andreoni | 15 July 2020
- Industrial policy: A long-term perspective and overview of theoretical arguments | Erik S. Reinert | 17 June 2020
- Socialising the risks and rewards of public investments: Economic, policy and legal issues | Andrea Laplane and Mariana Mazzucato | 7 November 2019
- Putting value creation back into 'public value': from market-fixing to market-shaping | Mariana Mazzucato and Josh Ryan-Collins | 3 June 2019
- The economics of change: Policy and appraisal for missions, market shaping and public purpose | Rainer Kattel, Mariana Mazzucato, Josh Ryan-Collins and Simon Sharpe | 31 July 2018
Missions require rethinking the state
The governance of missions is crucial to achieve them and this requires a change in how governments work and achieve their goals. Here are the key areas to consider:
- Outcomes-oriented policy design: A mission-oriented approach requires a new outcomes-oriented industrial policy framework – one that begins with the challenge, breaks it down into concrete missions, coordinate inter-ministerial and cross-sectoral action, and foster bottom-up solutions.
- Strategic tools and institutions: This means redesigning all tools and institutions in the government’s arsenal to play a role in tackling the mission, including strategic procurement, mission-oriented public development banks, and intellectual property rights. Procurement is an important tool for missions, as a significant portion of government expenditure resides in procurement budgets, which makes these powerful vehicles for shaping and creating markets. The state’s purchasing power can create market demand for products and services that align with its missions and can incentivize industrial transformation through conditions related to areas such as climate, health, and fair labour practices, alongside existing efforts to involve small businesses and include geographic criteria.
- New social contract: Missions can help design a new deal between government, business, and labour – one that recognises all economic actors as value creators and shares the risks and rewards of this contribution using tools such as conditionalities.
- Co-creation and participation: Community engagement and stakeholder relationships play a central role in ensuring industrial policy builds local and regional trust and brings citizens along in the economic transformation.
- Public finance: The quality of finance is just as important as the quantity. Public funds and public banks can be powerful tools for directing finance towards tackling big challenges, crowding in private sector finance oriented around missions, and providing the long-term, patient finance that is needed to support innovation through portfolio-based investments. Missions demand capable financial bureaucracies to steer finance towards meeting policy goals and measure the spillovers along the way.
UN DESA Policy Brief Special Issue: Financing the Sustainable Development Goals through mission-ori…
This paper explores how mission-oriented approaches can enable development banks to scale finance for the SDGs, crowd in private investment, and deliver fair, sustainable outcomes.
Mission-oriented public procurement: international examples
This report analyses public procurement as a fundamental tool in the implementation of a mission-oriented approach.
COVID-19 and the Need for Dynamic State Capabilities: An International Comparison
This paper shows how building long-term capacities and dynamic public sector capabilities is vital for governments to recover from COVID-19 and rebuild stronger economies and societies.
A mission-oriented community wealth fund for Camden: Governing finance with public purpose
This report identifies steps towards a new way of thinking about the future of the community wealth fund for the London Borough of Camden.
Mission-led procurement and market-shaping: Lessons from Camden Council
This paper examines Camden Council’s redesign of procurement, using a prototype ‘Mission Incubator’ in Homecare to show how commissioning can support broader mission goals like the Estates Mission.
Industrial Policy with Conditionalities: A Taxonomy and Sample Cases
This paper explores how reimagining contracts between public and private actors, and within government, can embed sustainability, innovation and public value at the core of modern industrial policy.
We work with governments globally to help redesign their industrial and innovation policies to be mission driven
IIPP launched a partnership with the Ministry of Management and Innovation (MGI) and Enap, Brazil’s National School of Public Administration, in July 2023. The team is advising the government on the design and implementation of its new mission-oriented industrial policy, with a focus on designing the state’s public procurement, state-owned enterprises, and digital capabilities to be mission-aligned. The recent report State transformation in Brazil explores the design and governance of public procurement, state-owned enterprises and digital public infrastructure as central elements of the government’s wider agenda of state transformation. In parallel, IIPP is executing an applied learning programme in partnership with Enap to strengthen the country’s public sector capacity.
Following a visit from the IIPP team to Barbados in February 2023 and several workshops with the Social Partnership –leaders from government, labour and business – the government adopted six missions, relating to climate resilience, social cohesion, food and water security, public health and safety, worker empowerment, and digital inclusion to help direct its growth strategy. The IIPP team is advising on the design of these missions and pursuing an applied learning programme to help in its implementation and governance.
IIPP partnered with the Colombian government on a project to inform the implementation of the government's National Development Plan, with a focus new approaches for measuring and maximising public value. In 2024, the final report was presented to President Gustavo Petro and his ministers on the margins of the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 16).
The institute has been advising the UK government on its economic policy for more than seven years on mission-oriented industrial strategy, moving from a sector-focused to an outcomes-centered plan. The current Labour government has adopted five missions to drive its economic agenda, directly inspired by IIPP’s work. At the local level, IIPP has been working with the council of Camden on the Camden Renewal Commission, resulting in the adoption of four missions co-developed with the community. IIPP has also worked on the implementation of these missions, focusing on leveraging tools such as procurement and community wealth funds.
In 2021-2022, IIPP advised the government of British Colombia in Canada as it developed its plan to build a sustainable, inclusive and innovative economic plan. Together with the government, IIPP collected input from a wide set of stakeholders, including B.C. businesses, labour organisations, Indigenous communities, not-for-profit organisations and local governments and the public. The work directly influenced the government’s Stronger B.C. Economic Plan, which was launched and adopted in March 2022.
Public sector capabilities are essential for missions
To shift from a market fixing to a market shaping mindset, the public sector and public servants require long-term capacities and dynamic capabilities to foster mission-oriented thinking, risk-taking, and experimentation. Missions demand creative, dynamic capabilities within government in order to, for example, anticipate, adapt, and learn within and across organizations; design tools, institutions, and partnerships that are mission-oriented and maximize public value; effectively engage citizens; and build and govern digital infrastructure that serves the common good and supports delivery of all missions.
COVID-19 and the Need for Dynamic State Capabilities: An International Comparison
This paper shows how building long-term capacities and dynamic public sector capabilities is vital for governments to recover from COVID-19 and rebuild stronger economies and societies.
Mission-oriented innovation policies: challenges and opportunities
This article reviews lessons from mission-oriented programmes, outlining how they can shape and co-create markets, and offering guidance on choosing and implementing mission-oriented policies.
Digital public infrastructure and public value: What is ‘public’ about DPI?
This paper examines how Digital Public Infrastructures can be created and governed to maximise public value, highlighting the normative values and state roles needed to ensure they serve the common go
Join our Mission-Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN)
The Mission-Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN) is IIPP’s policy network and peer-learning platform which brings together global public sector organisations to share the challenges and opportunities they face when stepping outside the market fixing box into a market-shaping role to respond to bold, difficult and complex ‘grand challenges’ such as climate change, ageing societies and preventative health care.
MOIN Casebook 2024
The 2024 MOIN Casebook presents a range of practical learnings from missions in action.
MOIN Resource Guide 2023
This guide provides an overview of UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)’s key research themes, publications and resources associated with mission-oriented innovation.
MOIN Casebook 2021
Compiled of eight stories from around the world, the casebook paints an emerging picture of how mission-oriented innovation is being implemented by public actors globally.
Learn more about our partners on missions
Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy For Transformative Change
To offer hands on advice to support mission owners, Fraunhofer ISI has developed an innovative toolbox for conceptualizing missions and assessing their impact.
The Age of Missions: Addressing Societal Challenges Through Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies in…
This paper explores how mission-oriented innovation policies can help Latin American and Caribbean countries direct investment toward socially impactful growth, drawing lessons from six case studies.
Mission-oriented innovation - a handbook from Vinnova
In this handbook, we tell about Vinnova's work together with a number of relevant actors to jointly create mission-oriented innovation.
EU Missions in Horizon Europe: History and Governance
EU Missions coordinate research across sectors to tackle societal challenges, drive innovation, and boost EU competitiveness, using top-down and bottom-up approaches for targeted impact.
