Philippe Aghion
Most incumbents meet a new technology by defending the business it threatens. The instinct is rational in the quarter and fatal over a decade. The harder question is how much competitive pressure a business needs before it starts innovating, and where that pressure tips into retreat.
Philippe Aghion won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how new technologies displace the firms that dominated the last era, and what leaders can do about it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Philippe Aghion
- He built the model most boards are implicitly betting against. The Aghion–Howitt theory of creative destruction, cited by the Royal Swedish Academy in 2025, explains why the company that owns a market today is usually the one that fails to invent what replaces it.
- His competition research puts a number on how much rivalry helps. With Bloom, Blundell, Griffith and Howitt in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, he showed that innovation rises with competition up to a threshold and falls beyond it.
- On AI he has firm-level data, not projections. French adoption data from 2017 to 2020 showed employment and sales rising at the firms that adopted, which is a different conversation from the displacement forecasts most executives have already heard.
- He has written the policy as well as the theory. He co-chaired France’s Artificial Intelligence Commission with Anne Bouverot; its 25 recommendations went to the President in March 2024 and fed the Paris AI Action Summit.
Biography highlights
- Chair of Economics of Institutions, Innovation and Growth at the Collège de France, Kurt Björklund Chaired Professor in Innovation and Growth at INSEAD, and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.
- Awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Peter Howitt and Joel Mokyr, for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.
- Co-author of The Power of Creative Destruction (Harvard University Press) with Céline Antonin and Simon Bunel, and of Endogenous Growth Theory (MIT Press) with Peter Howitt.
- Co-chair, with Anne Bouverot, of France’s Artificial Intelligence Commission, which delivered 25 recommendations on AI investment, training and computing capacity to the French President.
- Academic director of INSEAD’s Economics of Innovation Lab, which merges firm accounting, customs and patent microdata to study productivity and firm dynamics.
- Holder of two ERC Advanced Grants totalling €4.41 million, and recipient of the Yrjö Jahnsson Prize for the best European economist under 45, the John von Neumann Prize, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award shared with Peter Howitt. Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Biography
A 1992 paper in Econometrica set out a mathematical model in which economic progress is destructive by design. Better products enter, and the profits of the firms that made the old ones disappear. Philippe Aghion wrote it with Peter Howitt. The Royal Swedish Academy cited that work when it awarded them the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with the economic historian Joel Mokyr.
The theory has an uncomfortable corollary for anyone running a successful business: the incumbent has the least reason to invent what will replace its own margin. Aghion spent two decades testing where that logic bends. The 2005 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper with Bloom, Blundell, Griffith and Howitt found that competition and innovation follow an inverted U. Firms neck and neck with rivals innovate to escape the pressure. Firms too far behind stop trying.
That work moved from theory into government. Aghion co-chaired France’s Artificial Intelligence Commission with Anne Bouverot, delivering 25 recommendations on investment, skills and computing capacity that shaped the agenda for the Paris AI Action Summit. His empirical answer to the displacement question came from French firm-level records: among companies adopting AI between 2017 and 2020, employment and sales grew.
The data operation behind this sits at INSEAD and the Collège de France, where his Economics of Innovation Lab merges firm accounts, customs records and patent filings. His most recent ERC Advanced Grant, worth part of €4.41 million awarded since 2018, funds work on R&D policy for green innovation and on what the AI revolution does to growth and employment.
Key speaking topics
- Creative destruction and innovation-driven growth
- Competition policy and firm dynamics
- Artificial intelligence, productivity and employment
- Industrial policy and European competitiveness
- Green innovation and the climate transition
- Inequality, social mobility and inclusive growth
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees setting R&D and capital allocation against a disruption case
- CEOs and strategy directors of incumbent businesses facing well-funded new entrants
- Chief economists, CIOs and investors assessing the productivity case for AI
- Government, regulatory and industrial policy audiences in Europe
Audience outcomes
- A clear account of why market leaders systematically under-invest in the technology that will displace them
- The conditions under which competitive pressure raises innovation, and the point beyond which it suppresses it
- What French firm-level records show about AI adoption and employment, set against the standard displacement forecasts
- The specific levers, from competition rules to skills funding, that decide whether AI shows up in productivity figures