Institutional Foundations and the Spark of Innovation: A Commentary on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics

Abstract

Abstract: This paper provides a systematic review of the foundational contributions made by Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, the 2025 Nobel laureates in Economics, to the understanding of “innovation-driven economic growth”. The three scholars jointly constructed a systematic framework for understanding how innovation drives economic growth from different dimensions: Mokyr, adopting a historical perspective, profoundly revealed the importance of the institutional environments and cultural beliefs that sustain innovation, emphasizing the foundational role of an open knowledge ecology and a culture of growth in nurturing sustained innovative dynamism; meanwhile, Aghion and Howitt, building on the Schumpeterian growth model, transformed the insight of “creative destruction” into verifiable micro-mechanisms, articulating the inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation and the “escape-competition effect”, which means firms engage in “quality‐ladder” type innovations in pursuit of monopoly rents, thereby constructing a dynamic balance between creation and destruction. Their research inherits and extends the theoretical traditions of Solow, Romer, Schumpeter, and the institutional school, collectively demonstrating that sustained economic growth depends on an ecosystem that fosters innovation, tolerates failure, and ensures the free flow of knowledge. The institutional implications for China’s new era of innovation-driven high-quality economic development are as follows: To achieve a strategic shift from the “catch-up paradigm” to the “frontier paradigm”, it is necessary to move beyond simply increasing research and development investments. The focus must be on fostering a culture that encourages exploration, establishing a fair and competitive market mechanism, and implementing tailored industrial policies that align with different stages of development. These efforts will lay a solid institutional and cultural foundation for leading innovation.

Key words: institutional economics, economic growth, innovation-driven development, cultural environment, creative destruction

Liu Meng, Liu Xielin. Institutional Foundations and the Spark of Innovation: A Commentary on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics[J]. Management Review, 2025, 37(10): 3-9.

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