Mariana Mazzucato

that happened within mainly not only private sector institutions with NASA's also kind of leading investment, but especially leading kind of thought process of what the problems were that ended up getting us camera phones, foil blankets, home installation software.

So many different innovations across many different sectors, aerospace, nutrition, materials, electronics.

That itself is what we're talking about, right?

So whether it's going to the moon, whether it's trash collection, whether it's school meals, whether it's getting prepared for the next pandemic, which unfortunately the science tells us will happen, how are we even thinking within government in a problem-oriented way, a solutions-oriented way?

And this, by the way, is why the CityLab conference is so wonderful and Bloomberg's government innovation team is so important for so many cities is because they then share their experiences of solving problems.

And then they ask, and we're trying to help them do this with this public sector capability index, what did we learn along the way that we were missing?

Where were the bottlenecks?

What can we do better?

But especially in terms of that flexibility, adaptability, willingness to experiment, right?

Remember what Kennedy said, we're doing it because it's hard, not because it's easy.

Yet all the words and policy papers are about making things easier, facilitating.

I'm Italian, facile.

We're in Spain, facile, right?

So if you're facilitating someone, it's not going to be a good contractor.

If you're de-risking someone, it's not going to be a good contract.

If you're simply enabling, facilitating, fixing, it's going to be a very bad public-private relationship.

Accountability.

Absolutely.

So that's a really important point because, you know, one problem is when government doesn't have those capabilities for the reasons we said before.

Another is even when they have it, why are they not using it?