Nobelprisen bekrefter innovasjonens sanne kraft
Årets Nobelpris i økonomi til Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion og Peter Howitt er en hyllest til økonomer som har forklart hvordan innovasjon driver samfunn fremover.
The Nobel Prize Confirms the True Power of Innovation
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, is a tribute to economists who have illuminated how innovation propels societies forward.
The three laureates demonstrate that growth does not stem from more capital or labor, but from a continuous stream of ideas that replace the old and open new opportunities. Joseph Schumpeter called this process creative destruction. With this prize, the Nobel Committee reaffirms that innovation is the true engine of modern economies.
In much of my own academic work and opinion pieces in Finansavisen, I have drawn direct inspiration from Aghion and Howitt’s Schumpeterian growth theory from 1992. My aim has been to show how these mechanisms unfold within the service economy—how value creation emerges when firms leverage knowledge and technology to enhance customer experiences. This is where creative destruction takes place today: not in factories, but in digital services, healthcare, finance, and the public sector.
Joel Mokyr, through his historical scholarship, has shown that progress depends on explanatory knowledge—understanding why something works. This principle is profoundly relevant to modern innovation management. A firm succeeds not because it experiments the most, but because it learns the fastest. When we measure perceived innovation capability in Norwegian firms through the Norwegian Innovation Index, it is precisely this capacity for learning—the ability to turn insights into customer value and market attractiveness—that we seek to capture.
Aghion and Howitt, for their part, developed models showing how innovation simultaneously creates and destroys value. In the context of sustainable innovation, this duality becomes particularly clear: the green transition cannot happen without challenging old structures. We must dare to replace what is inefficient, not merely improve what already exists. In Norway, this means investing in new technologies and competences, even when doing so pushes established industries out of their comfort zones. Much of the current national debate centers precisely on this tension.
In recent years, Philippe Aghion has explored how artificial intelligence may unleash a new wave of innovation-driven growth. Here, his research intersects with our work on agentic AI and digital twins—technologies that can enhance both productivity and decision quality. Yet I believe we also need a new moral foundation for innovation: it must be human-centered, responsible, and sustainable. In our Social Profit Orientation research, we argued that success should be measured not only by financial returns, but also by social value and trust.
This year’s Nobel Prize reminds us that innovation is both an economic necessity and a societal responsibility. Without continuous renewal, economies stagnate. But the power of innovation must also be directed toward purposes that enrich people’s lives, not just shareholders’ portfolios.
Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt have given us the theories that explain how economic progress emerges. Our task—in research, business, and policymaking—is to ensure that these mechanisms work in practice. When we succeed, innovation becomes not only a driver of growth, but an expression of a society that continuously learns, shares, and improves.
To distribute value, one must first create it. This year’s Nobel Prize is about that essential truth.
