Labs that build nations

The Nobel economics prize committee has been remarkably consistent in highlighting what drives sustainable prosperity.

- JAYANT SINHA

It just awarded Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for showing how culture, institutions and creative destruction continuously translate invention into productivity. That prize extends a line from Robert Solow's growth accounting, which isolated technological progress as the dominant source of long-run gains, through Paul Romer's logic for making innovation endogenous, to William Nordhaus's climate change analysis. Read together, these prizes are a policy manual. Nations grow rich and resilient by building institutions that generate ideas and scale them quickly, while simultaneously preserving natural capital. India's version is the Green Frontier development model: Growth that marries global competitiveness with sustainability.

For India, that means we need to build the technological institutions that will be the engines of sustainable prosperity.

Countries have accomplished this by building powerful innovation ecosystems with corporate research labs as a key driver. These corporate labs have been sustained with patient capital and their inventions have been scaled up rapidly. Bell Labs remains the benchmark because it fused first principles with engineering and shipped results into the economy. Bell Labs inventions include the transistor, information theory, lasers, CCDs (charged coupled device), Unix and C, earning 10 Nobels and five Turings along the way. Note that the artificial intelligence's (AI's) technological breakthrough (namely transformer models), came from a single paper written by eight researchers at Google Brain, Google's AI research lab.

Germany's Fraunhofer Institutes pair predictable base grants with demanding contract revenue, so applied labs stay solvent and sharp. Japan funds the full arc from research to demonstration to deployment, allowing decade-long bets while enforcing milestones.