There is a myth so common we stopped noticing it is a myth.
The myth is that innovation is something the private sector does to a grateful world, while government stands to one side, slow and skeptical, catching up years later with regulation nobody asked for. Most of the tech press is built on it.
It is almost exactly wrong. And getting it wrong is about to cost us the next decade.
I say this as an innovation strategist who has now built on both sides of the line. I spent years building digital products used across twenty countries in Africa. Today I work inside the UK government on the National Data Library, national data infrastructure backed by more than one hundred million pounds. From the inside, the real story of innovation looks nothing like the myth.
Start with the record, because it is not in dispute, only forgotten.
In The Entrepreneurial State, the economist Mariana Mazzucato traced the technologies that make a smartphone feel like magic: the internet, GPS, the touchscreen, and the voice assistant behind Siri. Every one of them traces back to government-funded research, decades before a company packaged it into something you could buy. The private sector did the last mile, and it did it brilliantly. But the first mile, the patient, expensive, high-risk groundwork with no quarterly return, was public.
This is the pattern the myth erases. Government did not follow the breakthroughs. Government backed them, before there was a market to reward the risk.
Now look at what is coming.
The next wave of innovation is not another social app. It is foundational: artificial intelligence, digital identity, national payment systems, health data, the infrastructure the whole economy will run on. And here is the part builders need to hear clearly. These are not problems a market can solve alone, because they share a feature no product roadmap can accommodate.
They only work if they work for everyone.
An AI system that serves the confident and well-resourced while failing the vulnerable is not an innovation, it is a liability at national scale. A payment network that reaches the profitable and skips the poor is not infrastructure, it is a wall. A health data system that some people cannot trust is a system that fails at its one job. The next wave is made of exactly the problems the private sector is structurally built to walk away from, because walking away from unprofitable users is what focus means.
Which is the whole point of this piece.
Companies build products. Governments build services. A product gets to choose its user. A service cannot. When a company excludes the difficult user, we call it focus. When a government does the same thing, we call it a scandal. And we are right to. That higher standard is not bureaucracy. It is the only standard that produces innovation an entire population can actually rely on.
The proof is already visible in the countries that understood this early.
Estonia backed digital public infrastructure for two decades and now delivers effectively all of its public services online, ranking second in the world in the United Nations’ 2024 e-government survey. India backed public payment rails, UPI, which processed more than twenty billion transactions in December 2025 alone, reaching hundreds of millions the private banking market never found worth serving. In the UK, GOV.UK won Design of the Year in 2013, beating physical products, because a government service had become one of the best-designed things the country produced.
None of these were built to win a market. They were backed to serve a population. And they leapfrogged what the market alone had managed, not because these states had more money than Apple or Stripe, but because they treated the hardest, most universal problems as worth backing directly.
So here is what I want serious builders and serious policymakers to sit with.
The next wave of innovation must be government-backed. Not government-controlled, not government-slowed, backed. Funded early, when the risk is too high and the horizon too long for private capital alone. Held to the standard of serving everyone, not a profitable segment. Built on public infrastructure that no single company owns.
The countries and the founders who understand this will build the systems the next economy runs on. The ones still repeating the myth, that innovation is a private act and government is a brake on it, will spend the decade wondering why their brilliant products never reached the scale that actually mattered.
I spent years learning to build things people choose. It took working inside government to see the things a market will never build on its own, and to understand that those are the things that matter most.
The next wave belongs to whoever is willing to back them.
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