By Priyank Narayan
Every October, the Nobel announcements remind us that “ideas move the world”. This year the prize picks up a central question: why do some economies grow persistently while others stagnate?
The answer is simple and yet hard. Growth doesn’t come from capital alone. It comes from innovation, technologies, and new ways of doing things. It grows when systems (read institutions) and societies learn how to learn. The laureates —Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt—were recognised for having explained “innovation-driven economic growth”. A deceptively simple citation, but one that carries profound lessons for how we think about education, entrepreneurship, and the architecture of our universities.
Mokyr, the economic historian, looked backwards to understand progress. He showed that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t just about machines, it was about mindsets. Some societies began to value experimentation, openness, and the practical use of knowledge. They built bridges between thinkers and makers. Once that cultural shift took hold, growth followed.
Aghion and Howitt took that insight and turned it into economic theory. Their model of “creative destruction” explains how new firms and technologies constantly disrupt old ones, creating a cycle of renewal. Innovation drives growth, but also upends the status quo. It’s a messy churn of ideas, experiments, and failures.
The university as an ecosystem
Modern universities cannot be seen merely as a teaching shop or research silo. It is a living system where curiosity and creativity must constantly collide. Yet too many of our universities have grown inward-looking, optimising for control and compliance.
Mokyr’s research may have some ideas for renewal. He highlights three conditions that made innovation possible in past societies: usable knowledge, mechanical competence, and institutional openness. The three conditions can be applied to how we design and run our campuses.
Usable knowledge means connecting learning to real problems faced by industry, society, and the environment. It’s a fine balance between theory and practice, a tension that many academic toggle with in every class. Mechanical competence is equipping students to build and test ideas, not just write about them. Students must learn to build, not just analyse—whether it’s code, prototypes, or policy experiments. Institutional openness is being bold about breaking silos and inviting friction between disciplines, academia and industry, and between ideas that don’t fit neatly together.
Aghion and Howitt’s notion of creative destruction is particularly relevant for entrepreneurship education. Most start-ups are exploring how to destroy old assumptions about products, markets, and even human behaviour. Yet most entrepreneurship curricula still privilege business planning over discovery. We teach our students to optimise before they experiment and to seek certainty before every decision. We need more academic spaces where students can fail intelligently and bridge disciplines without permission.
The National Education Policy 2020 already nudges us in that direction: multidisciplinary learning, flexible credit systems, and research-linked pedagogy. But policy is only the scaffolding. The real work lies in systemic change in how departments collaborate and how leadership rewards initiative. The Nobel Committee’s recognition of endogenous growth theory is a wake-up call. It tells us innovation mindset must be baked into the system, not sprinkled on top.
What can universities change
First, initiate integrating live learning into every discipline. Every student should work on a real-world problem with an organisation, start-up, NGO, or government partner before graduating. When economics students work on waste-management start-ups, or political science majors help social enterprises with policy frameworks, they start connecting ideas to outcomes.
Second, we need to redesign faculty incentives. Today, most academics are rewarded for publishing papers, not building projects. We need to value the creation of knowledge through new methods, partnerships, and pedagogies. If a professor helps students co-design a low-cost medical device or the prototype of a civic tech solution, that should count as scholarship.
At Ashoka University and across many progressive campuses, we are beginning to replace static case studies with live projects, where students work on real problems with start-ups. They learn to sense, prototype, validate, and iterate: the grammar of creative destruction. But this mindset must not remain confined to entrepreneurship courses. It belongs in every domain. The goal is to create entrepreneurial thinkers—from biology to political science.
Because here’s the truth: the biggest problems—climate adaptation, digital inequality, public health, and AI ethics—will not be solved by “businesses and governments”. They will be solved by entrepreneurial thinkers who can change a societal mindset, hold ambiguity, and still act.
Aghion and Howitt’s theory also warns us that innovation comes with turbulence. In academia, we need to protect academic rigour while permitting pedagogical risk. When we change what and how we teach, we disrupt established hierarchies. Not everyone welcomes that. Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation, but so is chaos. The balance is delicate: enough structure to provide stability, enough freedom to allow imagination.
The Nobel Committee this year didn’t just reward an economic model; it celebrated a worldview. Growth, it said, is not an end in itself. It must serve human progress. The future will demand a frugal imagination—to solve more with less, to care for the environment and serve everyone through the process of disruptive innovation. Growth, like learning, is not inherited—it is renewed. Every generation must rediscover how to think, build, and begin again. And perhaps that is the deepest reflection from this year’s Nobel Prize.
The writer is founding director, Centre for Entrepreneurship, Ashoka University
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