## Notes from 02 March 2026 [[2026-03-01|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-03-03|Next note →]] A friend flagged [[Leonardo Quattrucci]]'s **"[Europe's Future Depends on an Unlikely Alliance: Bureaucrats and Startups](https://ministryofexperiments.substack.com/p/europes-future-depends-on-an-unlikely)"** (Sep 2025), which makes an argument parallel to [[Rainer Kattel]]'s _[[2026-03-01#Kattel's "Machinery of Urgency" — a progressive case for executive decisiveness?|machinery of urgency]]_: Europe's innovation crisis is fundamentally a crisis of the state. However, Quattrucci and Kattel are similar but not identical. Quattrucci proposes that the solution lies in procurement reform, [[DARPA-style setups|empowered program managers]], and talent circulation between government and startups. He is more explicitly focused on the GovTech ecosystem; his core claim is that governments need to become _customers_ of innovation—not just grant-makers or regulators—and that startups, in turn, need to engage the state as a strategic partner rather than a compliance cost to be avoided. What is particularly interesting is the convergence: two thinkers coming from different angles (Kattel from public administration theory, Quattrucci from a practitioner/startup-adjacent world) landing on nearly identical structural prescriptions: program-manager autonomy, fast procurement tracks, and a cultural shift regarding risk tolerance. The key difference is that Quattrucci seems less concerned about the accountability and selection problems I flagged in my note on Kattel. His framing is more optimistic and ecosystem-oriented, leaning heavily on the idea that "tours of duty" and cross-sectoral cross-pollination can bridge the cultural gap. My instinct is that this still underestimates how sticky bureaucratic incentives truly are, but the convergence itself is well worth tracking.