Three researchers who probed the process of business innovation won the Nobel memorial prize in economics Monday for explaining how new products and inventions promote economic growth and human welfare, even as they leave older companies in the dust.

Their work was credited with helping economists better understand how ideas and technology succeed by disrupting established ways — a process as old as steam locomotives replacing horse-drawn wagons and as contemporary as e-commerce shuttering shopping malls.

The award was shared by Dutch-born Joel Mokyr, 79, who is at Northwestern University; Philippe Aghion, 69, who works at the Collège de France and the London School of Economics; and Canadian-born Peter Howitt, 79, who is at Brown University.

"Of course I'm happy for achieving this recognition. I'm happy for our profession that we normally seek our praise and our congratulations and so on from our colleagues and to have the world at large award us something like this is really amazing," Howitt said to reporters during a news briefing celebrating the award.

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.”