That camel that's a horse designed by a committee

This is about a monument to slavery in France:

Setting aside the obvious practical difficulties that a memorial containing such a vast roll-call would pose, this is also a perfect example of how art cannot be devised by administrative bodies. A memorial should be entrusted to the vision of one artist, not determined by bureaucrats. The problem with steering committees and orientation committees is that they’re all too willing to impose their political or ideological agendas onto an artist’s design – which is a threat to the creative freedom that powerful work requires.

It has rather wider application. Change the words specific to art - memorial, art, design - and it’s a useful description of getting anything done. Particularly anything new in either business or product design.

We can even, just for the sake or argument, accept Ms. Mazzucato’s idea that Steve Jobs didn’t really create the iPhone. All the component parts existed, often government funded, all he did was just put them together. Well, yes, quite, Jobs was the one, the driving, tyrannical, force that did put them together. No government nor committee did so nor has done in the 15 years since.

You know, as with the artists and the memorial. Stone exists and has done for some time, so too drafting tables, paper, pencils all the required components. Yet without the individual driving the project there is no memorial, no art.

Which does rather give us our answer to Ms. Mazzucato’s insistence. By definition an entrepreneur is someone who takes extant economic resources to do something not being done by others. Someone who invents a new thing is an inventor, someone who owns an asset that is used is a capitalist, someone who works on the project is a worker supplying labour. The entrepreneur is the vision, the tyrant, that combines them to make it happen.

As with the creation of great art, to be an entrepreneur is a rare skill which is why it is highly rewarded. Whoever and whatever created the assets which are employed in the scheme.