Brace yourself for some dramatic new evidence about innovation and entrepreneurship – and circle the dates October 16 and 17 on your calendar.

Propelling leading-edge ideas about competitiveness, Professor Mariana Mazzucato will be among the luminaries at a major conference at the World Bank in mid-October, organized by the Bank’s global practice on Competitive Industries. An all-star array of policymakers, academics, business leaders and development practitioners will focus on today’s top global economic-policy challenge: spurring growth and job creation.

Exploring “Making Growth Happen: Implementing Policies for Competitive Industries,” the conference in the Bank’s Preston Auditorium will include Mazzucato among
some of the world’s foremost analysts of competitiveness. A professor at the University of Sussex in the U.K., Mazzucato’s iconoclastic new book  – “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths” – is now rocking the economics world. Mazzucato’s insights are forcing a rethinking about the essential role of the public sector in driving the investments that are shaping the modern economy.

Public sector? Shaping the economy? Yes, you read that right: Mazzucato amasses persuasive evidence that the government-funded development and deployment of advanced technologies has been pivotal in changing the economic landscape.

Government’s role as a growth catalyst has been just as creative as the role of the private sector – and perhaps even more venturesome. Despite their buccaneering bravado, for-profit firms have lately shied away from high-stakes, high-risk investments in unproven technologies. Mazzucato refutes the defeatist dogma that claims, falsely, that public-sector investment can never do anything right.