Mariana Mazzucato

So BNDES, which is one of the largest public banks in the world, it can either just, again, give money out to, say, the agribusiness industry or save the steel industry when it's going bust, or because there's an ecological transition, it can think about,

how these sectors themselves need to change in order also to access the loans that the bank is giving.

Germany, by the way, did that when they had the Energiewende policy, their public bank, the KFW, the way they provided support to the steel sector, which in the US and the UK and so many countries, steel is under pressure.

The loans to the steel sector were conditional that the sector lower the material content of production, which they did in their own way.

Had government told them how to do it, you kill innovation.

But strong direction.

conditional loans, and they ended up now having the greenest steel in the world.

It might not be competitive yet, and that's a scale issue that has also to do with regulation.

But repurpose, reuse, recycle technology in steel only happened because the public bank that was mission aligned.

So I'm very interested in

Procurement, public loans, state-owned enterprises, digital public infrastructure, examples where they're not just things that are there, but they're used to really transform and help development.

Sweden is also really interesting because they had a high level challenge.

Missions are somewhere between a challenge, like the space race, and a sector, like aerospace.

So the moon mission required lots of different sectors, but it was very concrete.

Whereas the challenge of, say, climate change or all the sustainable development goals, those are kind of very broad.

So transforming them into missions.

And their challenge was, I think they said they wanted a fossil-free welfare state.

And that's why then they said, well, what are the missions?

We were working with them on this.

And so we were kind of stimulating some of this thought through Vinnova, their innovation agency.