Are Ideas Becoming Harder to Find?

In the 33rd installment of the Hermann Staudinger Lectures, Philippe Aghion (Nobel Prize in Economics 2025) will present his groundbreaking research on growth and innovation. Aghion will argue that while ideas may get harder to find within each individual topic or field, the constant innovation reset from old lines to new lines makes ideas not harder to find in the aggregate. The Lecture will also look at the relationship between AI and the production of new ideas.

Philippe Aghion is a Professor at the College de France, at INSEAD, and at the London School of Economics, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the economics of innovation and growth.

With Peter Howitt, he pioneered the so-called Schumpeterian Growth theory which became a leading paradigm to analyze the interplay between growth, innovation, market structure, and firm dynamics. Much of this work is summarized in their joint books Endogenous Growth Theory (MIT Press, 1998) and The Economics of Growth (MIT Press, 2009), in his book with Rachel Griffith on Competition and Growth (MIT Press, 2006), in his survey «What Do We Learn from Schumpeterian Growth Theory» (joint with U. Akcigit and P. Howitt), and more recently in The Power of Creative Destruction (joint with C. Antonin and S. Bunel).

In 2001, Philippe Aghion received the Yrjo Jahnsson Award of the best European economist under age 45, in 2009 he received the John Von Neumann Award, and in March 2020 he shared the BBVA «Frontier of Knowledge Award» with Peter Howitt for «developing an economic growth theory based on the innovation that emerges from the process of creative destruction». He has been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2025 (jointly with Peter Howitt for their works on creative destruction, and with Joel Mokyr).