Quantum Leadership and the Economics of Discovery

When Canadian economist Peter Howitt picked up the phone early one October morning, a reporter told him he’d just won the Nobel Prize. Moments later, calls poured in from across the world. “It’s the dream of a lifetime come true,” he told CBC News. 

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics went to Howitt, Philippe Aghion, and Joel Mokyr — three researchers who spent decades asking why some nations keep growing while others stall. Their answer: growth follows invention, and invention flourishes where knowledge, competition, and public purpose intersect. 

That insight could have been written for this moment in quantum. 

In its citation, the Royal Swedish Academy described the laureates’ work as explaining innovation-driven growth. Mokyr traced how ideas layered upon ideas to create the Industrial Revolution. Aghion and Howitt modeled this process mathematically, showing how new technologies replace old ones — a dynamic Joseph Schumpeter once called creative destruction. 

As Le Monde summarized, economic power follows technological leadership. 

The new frontier of disruption 

Throughout history, technological leaps have redrawn the economic map. Steam power, electricity, semiconductors. Each emerged from scientific curiosity backed by public investment and entrepreneurial risk. 

Quantum technologies are tracing that same arc. Their potential to simulate molecular interactions, design new materials, and optimize complex systems points to industries that don’t yet exist. As the Nobel committee cautioned, sustained growth depends on “upholding the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.”  

Quantum innovation is one such mechanism now in motion. 

The economics of creative destruction 

When The Globe and Mail profiled Howitt after the award, it called his win “a proud moment for Canada’s intellectual leadership.” It also noted his caution that protectionism and short-term thinking can dull innovation. “Starting a tariff war just reduces the size of the market for everybody,” he told CBC. 

But Howitt’s deeper message was about building the conditions for progress. He reminded Canadians that sustained technological leadership depends on deliberate cooperation between governments, universities, and businesses — and on public investment that gives researchers and entrepreneurs the freedom to explore. As his co-laureate Philippe Aghion has long argued, the role of the state is not to replace markets, but to fuel discovery by supporting the frontier of science and innovation. 

That same dynamic underpins today’s quantum revolution. The breakthroughs shaping this field — from materials and fabrication to quantum error correction — emerge where research, policy, and industry converge. When governments support foundational science and help bridge it to commercialization, innovation compounds. Quantum development thrives in that spirit — global collaboration, shared standards, and knowledge exchange. Those who embrace it will shape not just new products but new industries. 

Canada’s role and Nord Quantique’s position 

Nord Quantique was founded on the belief that deep scientific breakthroughs can become national assets when they move beyond the lab. Our work in hardware-efficient quantum error correction aims to unlock scalable, fault-tolerant processors — the foundation for useful quantum computing. 

Advancing the frontier. By pursuing architectures that unlock error-corrected quantum computing with dramatically lower overhead, Nord Quantique contributes to what economists describe as frontier innovation — the process that pushes technological boundaries and drives long-term productivity. This idea, formalized in research by Nobel laureates Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt (including in NBER Working Paper No. 29724), underpins their broader thesis that sustained growth depends on continual, disruptive discovery. 

Connecting science and policy. We collaborate across government, academia, and industry — the cooperative triangle Howitt described — to translate discovery into economic impact. 

Building endurance. Deep-tech progress takes time. Our investment in people, partnerships, and IP ensures Canada remains a participant, not a spectator, in the coming quantum economy. 

Navigating sovereignty through collaboration 

Canada’s quantum leadership grows strongest when it’s rooted at home and connected to the world. Participation in major international programs —including U.S. initiatives like DARPA’s QBI [add link] — helps the field move faster while giving Canadian teams valuable benchmarks and partners.  

Our approach is simple: build core capabilities in Canada, engage globally on open standards and validation, and structure partnerships so talent, IP, and supply-chain gains strengthen the Canadian ecosystem even as we contribute to allied progress. 

The human side of invention

Behind every equation is a person following curiosity into the unknown. Howitt recalled his early years teaching in Ontario, learning what it meant to be a productive scholar. “Working in Canada was where I really cut my teeth as an economist,” he said. 
That humility and persistence define quantum researchers, too. At Nord Quantique, our goal is not simply to reach a technical milestone, but to expand what’s possible — to give scientists and industries new tools for understanding the universe at its smallest scale.  
Progress begins with imagination, then depends on steady, collaborative work. 

Looking ahead 

From steam to silicon, every revolution began with a handful of people convinced that science could serve society. Quantum continues that story — a convergence of physics, computation, and national ambition. 
But as this year’s Nobel reminds us, innovation doesn’t happen by chance; it happens by choice. We believe that Canada’s investment in quantum research, and Nord Quantique’s role within it, will show how that choice can translate into lasting prosperity. 
The age of quantum discovery is also the next chapter in the economics of growth. It’s being written today in labs, classrooms, and companies determined to lead.