Reference image : Source: Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2025. Images: Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Media. Nobel Prize

The academic community at large is responding quickly to the Nobel Prize in Economics 2025, reflecting on its implications and the impact it will have on research and innovation agendas in the coming years.

By 2026 there will be a boom in innovation and entrepreneurship centers, labs and spaces in the public and private sectors around the world, especially in growing countries such as those in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. These spaces will organize hackathons, competitions, meetings, as well as incubation and acceleration processes for projects, mainly related to social innovation and science and technology-based initiatives. This ecosystem will undoubtedly trigger an increase in the development of innovation districts throughout the region, which will drive a new economy in LAC.

Why the Nobel Prize in Economics 2025 is considered a global turning point for innovation?
Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt explained how technological innovation drives long-term economic growth. Their contribution can be summarized in five key points:

• Economies grow when people and companies innovate.
• Creative destruction” (new replaces old) is fundamental to this growth.
• Societies that support science, technology and education advance faster.
• Competition drives companies to create better solutions.
• His work explains why some countries progress more than others.

Three countries that represent a clear example of this dynamic are China, Korea and Singapore.

In short, the Nobel Prize in Economics 2025 not only recognizes a theory, but also constitutes a global call to rethink how we innovate, how we compete and how we build sustainable prosperity. If innovation is truly the engine of growth, then 2026 will be remembered as the year in which academia, governments and the private sector accelerated the transition to economies that are more creative, technological and open to change. Now it is the turn of Latin America and the Caribbean.

We have the talent, the needs and the opportunities. The question is not whether we should innovate, but how fast do we want to move into the future?

Authors:
Dr. Ricardo A. Ramirez-Mendoza – Rector
Director Julián Peña – Environmental Management and Renewable Energies, Research Center – CAYEI