The Economics
of Movement

Sophie Dalgish

When the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was announced, it felt oddly familiar.

Not because of the names - Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt - but because of the idea they were honoured for.

Their work explores how societies move from stagnation to growth through a process they call creative destruction - the constant cycle of innovation where new ideas replace the old.

It’s an elegant way of describing what we see everywhere today: change as a permanent condition, not an interruption.

At its heart, creative destruction is a theory of movement.

An economy grows when ideas, people and energy are in motion - when the system allows what’s next to emerge and what’s outdated to fall away.

But it’s also a warning: the moment that motion slows, stagnation begins.

The laureates point out that the biggest obstacle to innovation isn’t the absence of ideas - it’s the resistance to them.

Progress rarely fails for lack of invention; it falters because of the gravitational pull of incumbency. Those who have the most to lose often build the thickest walls against change.

That pattern plays out well beyond economics. In organisations, brands, and institutions, the same inertia applies.

We build systems to preserve what works - but those systems inevitably make it harder for something new to take root. We create success, then struggle to evolve it.

And yet, as the laureates remind us - growth depends on renewal.

Knowledge must accumulate, but also turn over. Ideas have to circulate, collide and sometimes be replaced entirely. It’s a cycle of release as much as creation - a dance between what has been and what might be.

If we take their insight beyond economics, it becomes almost philosophical - progress is less about scale, more about motion.

Movement in people, in ideas, in culture, is what keeps systems alive.
It allows for adaptation, regeneration, surprise. It makes growth feel less like expansion and more like evolution.

But movement doesn’t happen by itself. It needs design - social, institutional, and emotional. It needs spaces where experimentation is safe, where failure doesn’t end the story, and where power is distributed enough to let fresh ideas surface. It also needs rhythm; moments of acceleration and pause, destruction and renewal.

The Nobel Committee’s phrasing “innovation-driven growth” sounds technical. But read closely, it’s a call to something deeply human - the courage to change.

What this means for organisations

If creative destruction is the economy’s engine, then movement is its fuel. That means every organisation, no matter its scale or purpose, has to ask:

Are we creating the conditions for movement, 
or the conditions for resistance?
Do we reward motion or stability?
Do we protect what’s working, or do we make room for what’s next?
Do our systems encourage circulation of knowledge, or do they hoard it?

The answers to those questions shape whether an organisation evolves or ossifies. Because just as nations can stagnate, so can teams, products, and ideas.

The lesson from Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt isn’t that we must innovate endlessly. It’s that we must remain in motion - intellectually, culturally, organisationally.

Growth is not a state to achieve; it’s a state to sustain.

Designing for motion

In practice, creating movement means designing for flexibility rather than control. It means treating friction not as failure, but as evidence that something is shifting. It means valuing connection over ownership - because ideas that move are ideas that grow.

And perhaps most importantly, it means seeing change not as a campaign, but as a culture. Movement can’t be manufactured on demand, it has to be nurtured, given permission, given air. That’s true whether you’re building policy, a brand or a community.

The Nobel laureates framed their work as a theory of economic growth. But in a wider sense, it’s a reminder that motion itself is the measure of life in any system. 

What doesn’t move eventually withers.

The rhythm of renewal

There’s something poetic in the idea that destruction can be creative. It suggests that loss and growth are not opposites, but partners in the same rhythm. 

Economies, like people, renew themselves through cycles of letting go and beginning again.

Maybe that’s the deeper takeaway from this year’s Nobel: progress is less about efficiency, more about elasticity. It’s the capacity to bend, to shift, to respond, to stay in movement, even when the world resists.

Read more about this Nobel Prize

Always Evolving.
Constantly Relevant.

Copyright © 2025 addiktSchbang
All rights reserved