Mission Economy

Mariana Mazucatto

To carry out the Apollo mission, hundreds of complex problems had to be solved. Some solutions worked, many failed. All came out of a close partnership between government and business: a partnership with a purpose. It required an immense advancement in rocket power. Innovation was also needed in relatively new sectors such as electronics, navigation propulsion, life support, communications and flight controller systems, and in older sectors like textiles, materials and nutrition. But far from fearing failure, experimentation and exploration were welcomed and stimulated through the use of government tools and levers such as goal-oriented procurement policy.

Mission-oriented innovation involves both basic research and the combining of existing technologies into new forms to achieve a task. This, together with active project management and ambitious timescales, accelerated innovation for the Apollo programme. The mission itself could not have worked without a bedrock of invention that pre-existed and had derived from curiosity-driven or blue-skies science. Policies themselves were innovative, often providing no-strings-attached funding to technical groups at various NASA Centers and outside R&D contractors, along with broad guidance for what they needed to produce. This allowed significant free- thinking and innovative solutions to emerge, in contrast to a heavy-handed, central authority dictating solutions to technical teams. In other words, there was a strong underlying innovation system...

In 1958, the same year as NASA was founded, the US government also set up DARPA, the innovation agency of the US Department of Defense – most noted for its investment in what became ARPANET, today’s internet. Both were results of Cold War investments. And, similarly to NASA, DARPA’s key characteristics are its organizational flexibility... The organization encourages bottom-up design, which means that design is left to people like programme managers. They allow discretion in project choice and offer active project management. And indeed, without DARPA there would be no internet to have fuelled the twenty-first-century innovations. Better understanding the organizational structures that have encouraged problem-solving, risk-taking and horizontal collaborations is thus key to understanding the wave of future radical change.