You will recall that a central theme of Marianna Mazzucato's book, The Entrepreneurial State, is that all this gee whizz techno shiny shiny that we see around us really comes from stuff that the government has originally subsidised, invented, come up with or otherwise spirited into creation. And of course, the outcome of this is that all your money belong to us.

And one of the examples she gives is the way that the British government subsidised the work that made Apple's iPhone a possibility. Specifically, on touch capable screens able to understand dual movements (things like "pinch and zoom"), something crucial to the technology.

Ah, sadly no, as my sometimes colleagues over at The Register reveal. In fact, a plucky British inventor did come up with the idea, did indeed go to the government and they screwed around so much and for so long that another inventor got there first and was bought up by Apple.

Fentem submitted a funding application to Nesta in January 2003, while he continued to work on new prototypes. "When I first approached Nesta I was told that I would receive a funding decision within 6 weeks," he says. "However, it took Nesta a year to just write the contract. To put that in perspective, it took Apple only 2 years to conceive, develop and commercialise the entire iPhone."

It's worth reading the whole five pages at Andrew Orlowski has done an excellent job there. And the truth is that Nesta, the British government, did not in fact develop multitouch screens. In fact, they managed to cock up the development process so badly that someone else developed it. An advertisement for government direction of innovaiton this is not.

And it also rather guts Mazzucato's basic contention.

One problem, as I see it, is that it is in fact true that invention doesn't happen in isolation. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants after all. But what that means is that the next incremental improvement in whatever it is is ripe, ripe for the plucking as a result of all of the thousands of years of science and technology that we already have. That in turn means that to pluck it one needs to move quickly. And quick movement is just not something you're ever going to get when the State is involved.

Basic scientific research? Dreaming in ivory towers? Sure, the results will be public goods and there's a good argument for some tax funding there. But it's just not going to work in developing actual products and technologies. As the screens for the iPhone show, whatever the stories that Mazzucato is telling.