The PM champions innovation but Catherine Livingstone called it first, writes Jennifer Hewett.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, 2015 became Catherine Livingstone's time. More than any other business leader, the president of the Business Council of Australia fits Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's definition of the "zeitgeist".
Granted, she is chairwoman of a technology behemoth in Telstra rather than a start-up. But she has been talking eloquently about the implications of the new digital economy and of the speed of the technology revolution and, yes, innovation for far longer than Turnbull has been prime minister.
And no one has been more passionate in their analysis of what that means for the national interest. Whether it's Australia's need to urgently teach more STEM subjects or computer coding in schools, to appreciate how quickly technology is disrupting business models and the jobs market, to ensure greater collaboration between business and research or to enact fundamental tax and industrial relations reform, Livingstone has been arguing the case relentlessly.
And it's for that reason she takes the title as The Australian Financial Review's business person of the year. 
It's clear she feels a government led by Turnbull is at last on the same wavelength and that the national debate reflects this.
"The early signalling from the leadership of the Abbott government was that innovation was not a priority so everyone was a bit cowed," she says. "Then you get a prime minister who says innovation is really important and everyone jumps up and suddenly they have energy, when all they did was change a person. Change the person and the whole sentiment changes. So signalling and leadership is crucial - even more crucial than the dollars."
Not that this version of cause and economic effect is ever simple. Livingstone has always preferred to talk in terms of economic systems rather than bullet points.
"It is a complex system in a technical sense because you can't predict what the outcomes will be. But you do know that interactions all the way through the system are really necessary and the more interactions, the more chance you have of innovation occurring," she says.
"So there is no point in investing heavily in skills and education if there is no business for people to go into, no financing infrastructure for them to set up start-ups or not enough physical infrastructure to supply their goods over road or rail, or out of ports efficiently.
"If you pull on one lever on that system and it's not counterbalanced off by corresponding investment in another, it can have unintended consequences. You have to work on all elements because it is the weakest link that will take you down."
The government's innovation statement, she says, starts to recognise that there is a system and it's necessary to work on multiple fronts. Now she is aiming for a similar shift on tax reform, including a cut to corporate tax rates, as another key element for growth.
Her confidence in substantive reform next year may prove overly optimistic. The antagonistic reaction to the modest cuts in Treasurer Scott Morrison's budget update demonstrates the problem. But for Livingstone, it's the political change of focus of late 2015 that is the important step and long overdue.
By nature, she is measured in tone and dispassionate in her dissection of any issue. But over the course of this year, it had become harder to hide her frustration with politics in general and with the Abbott government in particular.
In   July, she declared "a low point for political leadership in Australia". This was after Joe Hockey quickly ruled out tax reform when Victorian premier Daniel Andrews announced the state was opposed to an increase in the GST.
"At a time of great economic uncertainty, Australia needs and deserves strong leadership and the opportunity to discuss reform options as a community," she said. "Any policy reform is hard but that is not an excuse for resiling from the challenge."
Then treasurer Joe Hockey retorted it was "easy to sit on the sidelines and to pass comments" but described the "blanket attack" as unhelpful to the cause of reform.
Even these sharp words didn't do justice to the fundamental divide developing between the Abbott government and a big business community represented by the BCA and led by Livingstone from   March last year.
After all, Tony Abbott's early Commission of Audit recommending drastic changes in government functions had been masterminded by her predecessor, Tony Shepherd, and former BCA economist Peter Crone. The criticism from Labor and the left was that the Abbott government's agenda was really that of the BCA. The unpopularity of the 2014 budget soon put paid to that attack.
But Livingstone's approach already seemed different anyway, including an emphasis on collaboration, research, new thinking and, of course, constant innovation. That she was a female business leader only made the contrast more obvious.
Her focus wasn't a natural fit with the culture of the Abbott government.
Initially, it had even imposed an effective ban on use of the word innovation - apparently because it reeked too much of Labor and central planning, when Abbott and Hockey were insisting the real problem was excessive government intervention. The preference was to suggest government should just get out of the way of business - at least in theory - and focus on budget repair.
For Livingstone, this was a fundamental misinterpretation of a complicated and interdependent world requiring a more nuanced approach and a focus on growth. Call it nimble, perhaps, or agile? In research papers, in speeches, in critiques of government policy, the BCA was determined to keep talking about the need to consider issues strategically rather than unconnected policy initiatives. This became even more important as commodity prices, which had so pumped up the Australian economy, began to steadily deflate.
One major BCA paper in the middle of last year talked about the need to build on Australia's comparative advantages. It quickly drew fire for "picking winners" but a chastened government followed up BCA recommendations as part of its own belated paper on competitiveness and innovation. That included the establishment of industry growth centres from last   July based on Australia's advantages in food and agribusiness, mining equipment and services, medical technology, advanced manufacturing and energy. The trouble by then was that no one really believed the government's commitment.
When then education minister Christopher Pyne threatened in   March to withhold funds from the national collaborative research scheme unless the Senate passed the government's plan for universities, Livingstone's exasperation was unmistakeable. How had the country had come to this, she wondered aloud? "Shame on us," she said.
Some senior Liberals made disparaging references to "business bureaucrats". This was particularly aimed at Livingstone and at BCA chief executive, Jennifer Westacott, with the implication Australia's top business leaders didn't agree with the criticisms.
That assessment was blissfully unmoored from reality, as various business leaders made clear, often startlingly clear, in private over the last year.
It still demonstrated how much business people rely on leaders of lobby groups like the BCA to express their concerns rather than risk attracting political attention by being too blunt themselves. And that emphasises the significance of the leaders of such groups, should they choose to articulate firm positions.
Livingstone was certainly in that category. While the timing may have been coincidence, she had taken on the role at the BCA with a particular set of skills that might have seemed tailor-made to address the range of issues emerging in fast-changing times. Not only was she intimately familiar with Telstra's technology challenges and advances after 15 years as a board member and more than six years as chair.
She had also been chief executive of Cochlear in the 1990s, the Australian company that developed the bionic ear. It was the example of using Australian medical breakthroughs to create a global business ahead of most Australian companies.
She then went on to chair the CSIRO, the repository of perennial hope for Australia's ability to do ground-breaking scientific research with commercial application.
Yet her own career path involving the combination of government, science and business entrepreneurialism came despite, rather than because of, her own career choices. Although Livingstone sounds permanently excited about science and technology, she did a chartered accounting degree at university because she thought it would be easier to get a job, especially as a woman.
Accounting led her to Nucleus, the umbrella company for Cochlear, which was then a relatively risky business proposition. Of the 10 companies in Nucleus 20 years ago, Cochlear is the only one to prosper. It drew on the experience of the others to develop into a spectacular example of commercial success ahead of its time.
"It just proved that when you get collaboration between government research and business and you have an entrepreneur in the business and you go for a global niche - which cochlear implants were - and you know your customer, and you work your ecosystem with people who are a bit battle-scarred from the same sector, then it tends to work," she says.
So by the time Livingstone arrived at the BCA, she had spent decades focused on how to improve collaboration, design thinking and computational thinking skills, which she believes are so necessary to build the jobs of the future. According to Livingstone, this is only becoming more urgent for the country and for all businesses.
She is particularly alarmed by the propensity to look backwards in areas such as workplace relations, when the nature and security of work is changing so radically. She is more concerned about upskilling a displaced workforce, she says, than old arguments over details of enterprise agreements.
"The world has changed pretty dramatically in terms of global competitiveness," she says. "There is not one sector almost in Australia that is not globally tradeable. Even if you are a domestic company, your customers have got global options. And if companies want to maintain their skills base and their valued employees, those high-skilled employees have options too. So competition is coming in at the level of the employee as well as at the level of the customer.
"Your day job is to do what you do better all the time but because your markets are moving you have to evolve your business model," she says.
Her wish for 2016? "To get Federation working so we stop competing with ourselves and start competing in the global environment."
That's optimism, 2015.