Innovation, growth, and the Schumpeterian Legacy | SBE Academics React to Nobel Prize in Economics 2025
On 13 October 2025, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for explaining innovation-driven economic growth.
“This year’s laureates in the economic sciences – Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt – have advanced our understanding of how innovation drives long-term economic growth. Their research highlights the mechanisms through which technological progress, creative destruction, and knowledge diffusion shape prosperity and productivity across societies. The laureates’ work deepens our insight into the dynamic relationship between innovation, policy, and economic development.” – Press release, NobelPrize.org
Below, you can find three opinion pieces by SBE Professors who were eager to share their thoughts on this year's Nobel Prize Laureates.
Giants and the shoulders they stand on - Luc Soete & Bart Verspagen
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics celebrates the Schumpeterian tradition, the understanding of growth as a process of creative destruction, and acknowledges the decades of research that have made innovation and technological change central to economic analysis.
Innovation and the dynamics of growth: a Nobel Prize for Joel Mokyr, Phillipe Aghion and Peter Howitt - Mark Sanders
Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt have helped move economics beyond static models of equilibrium and accumulation, toward a richer, dynamic understanding of capitalism as an evolving, innovation-driven process shaped by institutions and powered by better ideas replacing good ones.
Innovation, growth, and the missing pieces: a broader perspective on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics - Tania Treibich
Aghion, Howitt, and Mokyr’s work explains how innovation drives growth, but to sustain it, we must also consider the roles of public investment and demand. Innovation thrives not only on ideas but on the institutions and markets that enable their diffusion.
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