A foundation of economic prosperity is that individuals innovate and come up with good ideas, and that good ideas are shared and eventually widely adopted by others. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for their fundamental contributions in this area, using insights from economic history to pinpoint the combination of factors needed to come together for innovation processes to become self-sustaining, and to elegantly formalize theories of how ideas spread, compete with others, and disrupt preexisting technologies, in a process of creative destruction to drive economic growth.