UCL and Google host women and the Industrial Strategy event

Women and the economy would benefit from a mission-oriented approach to industrial policy that focused on concrete problems in areas of sustainability and care, said Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), speaking at an event on women and the Industrial Strategy. Professor Mazzucato joined Katie O'Donovan, Public Policy Manager at Google; Kate Bell, Head of Economic and Social Affairs at TUC; Professor Sue Himmelweit, Open University and co-founder of the Women's Budget Group; and Rannia Leontaridi, Director for Disruptive Business and Business Dynamics at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BEIS) to discuss how issues relating to women can inform the Industrial Strategy ahead of the Government's White Paper. Professor Mazzucato spoke of the exciting come-back of industrial strategy "after years of being a near blasphemy" and the need to use this window of opportunity, not for handouts to sectors, but to focus public and private investments around concrete "missions" addressing challenges in areas of sustainability and care. Missions, according to Professor Mazzucato, are broader than sectors, enabling multiple sectors to interact in new ways. For example, care could benefit from innovations in how we think about housing, health and nutrition. Furthermore, she argued a strategic investment agenda around "green" and "care" can help to "crowd in" business investment. She pointed out that the era of big data could enable not only profit-led enterprise such as personalised medicine, but also innovations in the public sector and welfare provision.