Mariana Francesca Mazzucato (born June 16, 1968) is an Italian-American economist and academic. She is a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL) and founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). She is best known for her work on dynamics of technological change, the role of the public sector in innovation (including modern "mission-oriented" policies), and the concept of value in economics. The New Republic have called her one of the "most important thinkers about innovation".
Mazzucato has published widely in the fields of innovation economics, value theory and political economy, and more recently on climate change and the triple planetary crisis. She is the author of various books, including The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, and Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Her latest book, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our governments and Warps our Economies, co-authored with Rosie Collington, analyses the problematic relationship of the consulting industry to businesses and government administrations.
Her career has emphasised translating economic ideas into policy and she holds numerous high-level policy roles. Mazzucato is currently a member of the UNESCO High Level Expert Group on Ecosystem Level AI Governance, and member of the WEF Centre for the New Economy and Society Advisory Board. She was also appointed member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC) of South Africa by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2019. Previous roles include co-chairing the Group of Experts on the G20 Taskforce for the Global Mobilization against Climate Change alongside Dr. Vera Songwe, co-chairing the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) with WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Professor Johan Rockström and Singapore Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam; chair of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All, a member of the Scottish Government's Council of Economic Advisers, and the United Nations' High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs.
In 2021, in recognition of her contributions to economic theory and policy, Mazzucato received from the Italian President the Grand Officer grade of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, Italy's highest civilian honour.
Early life and education Mazzucato was born in Rome, Italy, to parents Ernesto Mazzucato, a physicist, and Alessandra Bardella, who are both Italian. Her elder sister is the agricultural economist, Africanist and Maastricht University professor ., 'Sisters doing what they love', maastrichtuniversity.nl, 16 June 2016. In 1972, the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey in the United States with their three young children, after Ernesto accepted a position at Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory. Mazzucato spent most of her early life in the US before returning to Europe.
In 1986, Mazzucato graduated from Princeton High School. In 1990, Mazzucato received a B.A. in history and international relations from Tufts University. As an undergraduate student, she did an exchange program to Mexico City and attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she studied for a year and was first introduced to the study of political economy. In 1994, Mazzucato received a M.A. in economics from the New School for Social Research before earning her PhD in economics at the New School in 1999. Her dissertation was titled Four Essays on Evolutionary Market Share Dynamics: A Computational Approach. Her thesis advisor was Willi Semmler, with Lance Taylor, Duncan K. Foley, and Charles Tilly as additional committee members.
Career Academic
Mazzucato was Professor of Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, where she founded the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) in 2017 to "explore how the public, private and third sector can work together in new and dynamic ways to drive innovation in order to tackle societal and technological challenges and shape and create new markets", building on Mazzucato's work on The Entrepreneurial State.
Her career began in 1995 as an adjunct professor of economics at New York University until 1997. She taught at the University of Denver between 1997 and 1999. Between 1998 and 1999 she was a post-doctoral Marie Curie Research Fellow at the London Business School where she worked closely with Paul Geroski. She joined The Open University in 1999 as a lecturer and became a full professor in 2005, where she founded their Innovation, Knowledge and Development research centre. From 2008 to 2010 she was a visiting professor at Bocconi University. In 2014, she was a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Technology Sydney. Between 2011 and 2017, she was the RM Phillips Chair in the Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex before moving to University College London in 2017. In 2024 she co-founded the Strategic Economics Alliance, a global network amplifying the voices of female economists from the Global South in promoting new economic theory.
Economic advisory Mazzucato has been active in advising governments on innovation, industrial strategy and growth policies. Between 2015 and 2019, she was a member of the international advisory panel of Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. In 2018, she was co-chair of the Commission for Mission-Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy informing the Government of the United Kingdom's Industrial Strategy. In 2019, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed Mazzucato to be a member of his Economic Advisory Council, a position where she remains active in providing recommendations for building sustainable and inclusive development.
Since 2020, Mazzucato has been a member of the Innovation Expert Group at the United Kingdom Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and a member international advisory panel of Vinnova, Sweden's innovation agency. In 2020, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte appointed Mazzucato as a Special Advisor on economic policy and made her Italy's representative economist on the G7 Panel on Economic Resilience which advised the G7 leaders at the 2021 G7 Summit in Cornwall, UK.
She is currently a member of the Council of Economic Advisors to the Scottish Government, a role she has held since 2015. She worked closely with the Scottish Government and First Minister in establishing the Scottish National Investment Bank in 2018. Between 2015 and 2016, she served on the British Labour Party's Economic Advisory Committee providing advice to the Shadow Cabinet.
As well as national governments, Mazzucato has also served as an economic advisor to international institutions, including the World Economic Forum, the European Commission, the World Health Organization, the OECD, and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. From 2017 to 2021, Mazzucato sat on the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network Leadership Council. She was a member of the European Commission's Task Force on Public Sector Innovation and their expert group on Innovation for Growth (RISE). From 2018 to 2019, she was Special Advisor to the European Commission's Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas.
In 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, appointed Mazzucato as Chair of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All. From 2022 to 2023, she served on the European Space Agency's High-Level Advisory Group on Human and Robotic Space Exploration for Europe.N° 11–2023: Independent advisory group presents report on European space revolution to ESA European Space Agency (ESA), press release of 23 March 2023. Between 2022 and 2024 she co-chaired the OECD's Global Commission on the Economics of Water with Johan Rockström, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Tharman Shanmugaratnam. In 2024, Brazilian president Lula Da Silva appointed her co-chair of the Group of Experts on the G20 Taskforce on a Global Mobilization against Climate Change with Vera Songwe. Mazzucato also served on the United Nations' High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the OECD High-Level Advisory Panel on Climate and Economic, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Solutions Network Leadership Council, the United Nations' Committee for Development Policy and the Commission for Universal Health convened by Chatham House.Commission for Universal Health Chatham House.
In addition to formal appointments, Mazzucato and the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose have advised several government administrations on innovation policy and green growth in the United States, Brazil, Colombia and Barbados. Lessons from this work were shared on the IIPP report Mission-oriented industrial strategy: global insights, published in 2024.
Mazzucato has authored a number of policy reports, including Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union, followed by the report Governing Missions in the European Union, which directly informed the EU's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, and Transformational Change in Latin America and the Caribbean for ECLAC. Other relevant reports include the Global Commission on the Economics of Water Final Report on valuing the hydrological cycle as a global common good, and the report A green and just planet, authored by the G20 TF‑CLIMA Group of Experts, both published in 2024.
In April 2026, Whitechapel Gallery appointed Mazzucato as its first Economist-in-Residence for a three-year term ending in March 2029, a pro bono role focused on the economics and public value of arts and culture.
Research
Innovation Mazzucato's research has addressed the relationship between innovation, government policy, financial markets and economic growth, spanning the company, industry and national level. Much of her work has been inspired by the Schumpeterian framework of evolutionary economics. Her early research was on the origin and evolution of persistent differences between firms and the implications of this for industry life-cycles and differences in sector structure. Her empirical studies have focused on the automobile, PC, biotech and pharma industries.
In 2013, Mazzucato published her most famous work, The Entrepreneurial State. The book pointed to the key role that she believes government actors have played in driving radical innovations in their early stages, especially in the US. It outlined a number of case studies across different sectors - including biotech, pharmaceuticals and clean technology - to show that the high-risk investments have been made by the state before the private sector gets involved. In a well-known chapter examining the iPhone, she outlines how the technologies that make it 'smart' – the internet, GPS, its touchscreen display and the voice-activated Siri – were all government-funded. She argues in the book that public funds are laying the groundwork for the green revolution in a similar way to biotech and nanotech.