TL;DR
- The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics honored research proving that true progress comes from embracing disruption, not protecting the status quo.
- Cybersecurity faces a similar challenge: most organizations invest in tools but fail to build ecosystems that support real, sustained security.
- 68% of breaches still stem from human error despite widespread training mandates, showing a gap between awareness and actual capability.
- Practitioner-led, hands-on cybersecurity training can drive the same kind of “creative destruction” needed to transform security outcomes.
- The real question isn’t whether training should evolve but whether organizations have the courage to disrupt their outdated approaches.
This week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for explaining how innovation drives sustained economic growth through "creative destruction."
Their research reveals a powerful truth: progress doesn't come from protecting old systems—it comes from embracing the disruption that makes us stronger.
Sound familiar? It should.
The laureates demonstrated that economic prosperity requires more than just inventing new technologies. Success demands understanding WHY something works (not just THAT it works), institutions willing to embrace disruptive change, and a skilled population ready to put advances into practice.
Replace "economic prosperity" with "organizational security," and you've just described the crisis facing cybersecurity today.
The Training Gap That's Costing $10.5 Trillion
Despite 90% of companies mandating security training, 68% of breaches still stem from human error. This isn't a failure of invention - we have the tools. This is a failure of the ecosystem surrounding those tools.
Companies treat security awareness like pre-Industrial Revolution societies treated innovation: as isolated events rather than continuous, self-generating processes. They deploy 45+ security tools on average, yet 70% of employees still engage in unsafe behaviors.
Why? Most organizations treat cybersecurity training like any other corporate training exercise, rather than a serious, challenging, risk-reduction program led by practitioners who understand attacker tactics.
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, if cybercrime were a country, it would be the world's third-largest economy, with annual damages reaching $10.5 trillion, up from $3 trillion in 2015. The Nobel laureates proved that sustained growth requires not just innovation, but the institutional willingness to embrace what disrupts the status quo.
Every dollar invested in practitioner-led security training saves five dollars in breach costs. Yet organizations continue funding the equivalent of 19th-century cottage industries while attackers operate like multinational corporations.
The math isn't complicated. The institutional courage is.
What Creative Destruction Looks Like in Security Training
Philippe Aghion put it perfectly in today's press conference: "Progress is never calm. It thrives on disruption, creativity, and courage."
The cybersecurity training market needs its own creative destruction moment.
Often, employee awareness training consists of training divorced from the threat landscape, compliance theater rather than capability building. The breakthrough? Practitioner-led platforms that unify training with testing in frameworks that security teams actually control. Training that reflects current attack techniques. Education is measured by risk reduction, not course completion rates.
Joel Mokyr demonstrated that before the 18th century, knowledge was fragmented—people applied discoveries without understanding why they worked. Once scientific reasoning complemented experimentation, innovation became self-generating.
Modern security training suffers from the same fragmentation. Employees click through modules without understanding the threat chains. They're taught WHAT not to do, but not WHY attackers succeed.
The prerequisites for sustained organizational security mirror those for economic growth: practitioner expertise guiding training design, active learning that blends knowledge transfer with hands-on simulations, persistent programs that keep pace with the threat cycle, and security teams that lead capability development across the organization.
The Choice Ahead
Aghion and Howitt's mathematical models of creative destruction show that every major innovation—from steam engines to the internet—displaces older technologies. The process is painful but essential. New solutions strengthen the workforce, even as they make old approaches obsolete.
The question isn't whether your security awareness program needs to evolve. The question is whether your organization has the institutional courage the Nobel laureates identified as essential for sustained progress.
Because the human layer of security hasn't caught up yet—and that's precisely where the next wave of breaches will begin.
