The goal here wouldn't be to form a successful business, but to serve needs directly. Creative, innovative people will continue to create and innovate as long as they are employed specifically to those ends.

There are probably business journals that put this better, but the issue may not be that these creative people will vanish if we directed them to serve a need. Rather, the issue may involve willingness to take risks to try crazy new ideas because the potential reward is great. Ownership in the results may be much more powerful than a static unchanging government salary. I'm not sure how this may translate to an organization level, but suspect similar dynamics at play, along with a good amount of competition to move things along (edit: that is, when there are multiple private entities vs a single state entity doing the directing).

I don't really see how an engineer at Blue Origin is more willing to take risks or has more ownership in the results than say an engineer at NASA JPL. If anything the engineer at NASA has more ownership since their work is in the public interest, rather than making some billionaire marginally richer.

> I don't really see how an engineer at Blue Origin is more willing to take risks or has more ownership in the results than say an engineer at NASA JPL

An engineer at SpaceX or Blue Origin is incentivized differently from one at JPL. SpaceX isn't designing rovers for a Titan mission or exploring novel theoretical propulsion systems. And NASA wasn't able to turn its decades of work on propulsive landing into a competitor to the Space Shuttle, Atlas or the SLS.

Note, too, that engineers at NASA are at the whim of Congress. I know several whose life work was cut in a budget negotiation thousands of miles away. I know several more who left aerospace for better pay in other industries.

>Note, too, that engineers at NASA are at the whim of Congress. I know several whose life work was cut in a budget negotiation thousands of miles away. I know several more who left aerospace for better pay in other industries.

Fair point, it does require the state to be willing to sufficiently and consistently invest in the effort for it to succeed.

Really depends how you look at it, but there is at very least disagreement who really has been taking the actual big innovation risks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State

That is not to say that then companies don't need to form around it, but not as black and white.

The Japanese managed to grow their economy quickly because they did window guidance. People will complain about central planning yet there are countless of examples of governments that "macromanaged" their economy into success.