Creative destruction for growth

Human history is crammed with evidence of what economists call creative destruction-the process of innovation that propels economic growth.

- Santosh Kumar Mohapatra

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2025 has been awarded to Joel Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University in the US; French economist Philippe Aghion of Collège de France, and Peter Howitt of Brown University for explaining how innovation leads to sustained economic growth and the process of "creative destruction"- a concept widely regarded by economists as a central feature of capitalist economies.

According to The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Prize was split, with half going to Mokyr for explaining the role of technological innovation and the other half to Aghion and Howitt for identifying technology as a crucial driver of long-term economic growth and developing the mathematical model of creative destruction. The word "creative" refers to the new innovations brought to market and "destruction" to the fate of those antiquated products and processes that are replaced by the new innovation. Creative destruction always produces