Speakers and Chairs Bios

Professor Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) holds the RM Phillips chair in the Economics of Innovation at the SPRU in the University of Sussex. She has held academic positions at the University of Denver, the London Business School, Bocconi University and the Open University.

Her book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem) was on the 2013 Books of the Year list of the Financial Times. It focuses on the need to develop new frameworks to understand the role of the state in economic growth—and how to enable rewards from innovation to be just as ‘social’ as the risks taken. A US edition, featuring a new introduction, was published in 2015 by Public Affairs. Professor Mazzucato is winner of the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy, the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis and in 2013 the New Republic called her one of the '3 most important thinkers about innovation'.

She advises policy makers around the world on innovation-led growth and is currently a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors; the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Economics of Innovation and SITRA’s (the Finnish Innovation Fund) Advisory Panel.

Her research focuses on the relationship between financial markets, innovation, and economic growth—and how to allow smart, innovation-led growth to be also more inclusive and sustainable. Her current projects on Innovation-fuelled, Sustainable, Inclusive Growth (ISIGrowth) and Distributed Global Financial Systems for Society (DOLFINS) are funded by the EU Horizon 2020 initiative. She has also recently worked on research projects commissioned by organizations including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Brazilian Ministry for Science and Technology. Between 2009-2012 she directed a large 3 year European Commission FP7 funded project on Finance, Innovation and Growth (FINNOV). Her recent project on Financing Innovation was funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and her project on Finance and Mission Oriented Investments was funded by the Ford Foundation's Reforming Global Financial Governance initiative.

She is co-editor of a new book, Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Wiley Blackwell, July 2016), and is currently writing The Value of Everything, which will be published by Penguin’s Allen Lane in Spring 2017.

Her research outputs, media engagement (including articles in the FT, Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Guardian and Foreign Affairs), and talks (including her TED Global talk), can be found on her website.