It is 12:30pm and Mariana Mazzucato is already on her fifth espresso of the day. “It’s because I’m Italian,” she says.

Regular coffee hits might be the only way the outspoken Italian-American academic can manage her hectic schedule. Alongside running her own department at University College London, advising policymakers and appearing everywhere from BBC2’s Newsnight to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (her playlist included Verdi, Amy Winehouse and Blues Traveler, whose members were among Mazzucato’s classmates at secondary school), she also writes very influential books such as 2013’s The Entrepreneurial State, which caught the attention of the likes of Bill Gates. In it she argued that, contrary to the myth that free-market dynamism was the source of the US’s post-war economic success, much of it stemmed from government-backed innovation.