Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the Nobel memorial prize in economics Monday for explaining how innovation creates new products and promotes economic growth and human welfare even as it leaves old businesses in the dust.

Their work was credited with helping economists better understand how new ideas and inventions come about — a process as old as steam locomotives replacing horse-drawn transport and as contemporary as e-commerce shuttering shopping malls.

Dutch-born Mokyr, 79, is at Northwestern University; Aghion, 69, at the Collège de France and the London School of Economics; and Canadian-born Howitt, 79, at Brown University.

Speaking to the Associated Press at his home in Paris, Aghion said his phone had not stopped ringing since the announcement.

"It came as a total surprise," he said. "I've received calls and emails from people all over the world, and it's a fantastic experience, of course."

The winners were credited with better explaining and quantifying “creative destruction,” a key concept in economics that refers to the process in which beneficial new innovations replace — and thus destroy — older technologies and businesses.

The concept is usually associated with economist Joseph Schumpeter, who outlined it in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.”

Schumpeter called the concept “the essential fact about capitalism.”

The Nobel committee said Mokyr “demonstrated that if innovations are to succeed one another in a self-generating process, we not only need to know that something works, but we also need to have scientific explanations for why.”

Aghion and Howitt studied the mechanisms behind sustained growth, including in a 1992 article where they constructed a complex mathematical model for creative destruction that added new aspects not included in earlier models.

Examples of creative destruction include e-commerce disrupting retail, streaming services replacing videocassette and DVD rentals and internet advertising undermining newspaper advertising.

The winners represent contrasting but complementary approaches to economics.

AP video by Oleg Cetinic