Hot topic: What boosts economic growth? It’s not rocket science! (Actually, it is.)
You’d expect us here at Optimum Strategic Communications to be excited about Nobel Prize season – particularly the gongs for the two categories of Physiology or Medicine and Chemistry. And we have been.
But it’s this year’s Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences that really caught our eye, because it has major implications for the life science industry.
Three economists won the prize, all for variants on the same theme: proving that it’s innovation that drives lasting economic growth.
Joel Mokyr won “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”.
He showed Britain’s industrial revolution happened as a result of “a culture of growth” where fundamental scientific advances went hand-in-hand with the development of practical knowledge to apply them. Think of Isaac Newton’s apple and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket. Institutions that fostered innovation were also vital. As we all know, this remarkable revolution helped transform Britain into a global superpower.
Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won for taking the famous idea of early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter, that capitalism advances through a process of “creative destruction”, and proving it’s true. Using a mathematical model, they showed that economic growth is the result of a steady stream of innovations that disrupt the status quo and make existing technologies (or ways of doing things) obsolete.
Maybe all of this is obvious. “It’s not rocket science!” you might say. And perhaps that’s true.
Except, what it shows is vital. It shows that it’s the fundamental innovations in rocket propulsion labs, and computer labs, and cell and gene therapy labs, and bio-mechanical labs – etc, etc, etc – that drive sustained economic growth.
Want real-world evidence of this? Look at how it’s the US and China – today’s technological powerhouses – that have really motored ahead economically in the 21st century.
Europe is still a world leader in many areas of technology, including of course the life sciences. But to return to serious economic growth, Europe needs to harness that remarkable innovation better, by doing everything it can to get it out of the lab and into the marketplace.
Europe needs to strap on the rocket boosters.
