An economist has been shortlisted for a competition celebrating world-class thinkers.

Professor Mariana Mazzucato, of the University of Sussex, was described as a leading voice in the economics of politics by judges of the inaugural New Statesman SPERI Prize.

Judges praised “the originality of Professor Mazzucato’s thinking, her willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom and her capacity to take her arguments forward with gusto”.

Her book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private Versus Public Sector Myths, released in 2013, shot down the myth of an innovative private sector versus a static, bureaucratic State.

The book used the history of the internet, biotech, nanotechnology and the emerging clean technology sector to show how radical innovations happened because of state investment.

Her TED talk on the subject has been viewed online more than 600,000 times and used the history of the iPhone to illustrate this point in a concise and dynamic way.

The winning scholar will have succeeded most effectively over the last two or three years to disseminate original and critical ideas in political economy to a wider public audience.