An international cadre of preeminent researchers and scholars has been shortlisted for the esteemed Panmure House Prize 2025, a prestigious award celebrating groundbreaking advancements in financial research that champion long-term thinking and innovation. With a substantial monetary endowment of $75,000, the Prize underscores the critical importance of strategic economic foresight and institutional ingenuity that can shape sustainable societal progress over generations.
Since its inception in 2021, the Panmure House Prize has rapidly gained global attention, attracting submissions from North America, Europe, and beyond. Reflecting the award’s widening influence, the 2025 shortlist exemplifies a diverse and interdisciplinary approach, drawing experts whose research harnesses rigorous empirical analysis and theoretical innovation to confront pressing, long-horizon economic challenges. Administered in collaboration with FCLTGlobal, a non-profit committed to fostering long-term investment strategies, and sponsored by Baillie Gifford, a renowned investment management firm, the Prize represents a confluence of academic excellence and practical impact.
The Prize honors Panmure House, the historic Edinburgh residence of Adam Smith, whose philosophies laid the foundations of modern economics and ethical capitalism. Today, Panmure House serves not only as a symbolic institution but as a dynamic hub for thought leadership on sustainability, capitalism, and innovation. The current Prize cycle embodies these principles by rewarding transformative ideas that can recalibrate business strategies and economic policies towards enduring value creation.
Professor Adam Dixon, Chair of Sustainable Capitalism at Panmure House, emphasized the Prize’s role in mobilizing rigorous scholarship with far-reaching societal implications. “This Prize spotlights the critical nexus of intellectual ingenuity and pragmatic application in addressing long-term societal imperatives,” Dixon noted. He stressed that incentivizing bold, methodologically sound research can inspire systemic change in economic thought and practice, particularly in areas where short-termism currently prevails.
Among the distinguished finalists, Professor Joshua Pearce of Western University in Canada stands out for his pioneering work in open-source hardware. His research elucidates how the ethos of open-source software can be transposed to hardware development to accelerate scientific innovation. By fostering collaborative environments where technological blueprints can be freely shared and iteratively enhanced, Pearce advocates for a paradigm shift in how scientific instrumentation and experimentation are conceived, developed, and disseminated at scale.
Professor Killian Huber from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business offers a critical examination of corporate investment behaviors, highlighting a pervasive shortfall in long-term capital allocation. His empirical analyses reveal a systemic impatience among firms, which hampers investment in durable assets and R&D, thereby undermining sustainable growth trajectories. Huber’s work rigorously interrogates the structural factors influencing investment horizons, proposing mechanisms for aligning corporate strategies with broader societal and investor expectations to remedy this inefficiency.
From the University of London, Professor Pedro Gomes investigates the multifaceted economic and social implications of adopting a four-day working week. His research integrates complex economic modeling with sociological metrics to capture how such a structural labor market shift would influence productivity, worker well-being, and broader consumption patterns. Gomes’s quantitative assessments engage with intricate feedback loops between leisure time and innovation, offering a nuanced evaluation of whether contemporary economic and social conditions favor the adoption of reduced working hours.
Professor Tima Bansal of Ivey Business School in Canada advances the integration of sustainability principles into mainstream business strategies. Her interdisciplinary methodology synthesizes systems thinking with design thinking to develop robust frameworks for corporate sustainability transformations. By working closely with industry partners, Bansal’s contributions bridge the gap between theory and practice, enabling companies to embed environmental and social considerations into their operational and strategic decision-making processes, thereby fostering resilient and responsible business models.
The Panmure House Prize selection process is marked by rigor and intellectual exactitude, overseen by a panel of eminent economists, business scholars, and policy experts. Each entry undergoes stringent evaluation based on originality, empirical rigor, significance, and pertinence to contemporary economic dialogues. The scrutiny ensures that the Prize upholds the highest standards and stimulates scholarship capable of catalyzing systemic economic improvements.
Award recipients leverage the Prize funds to amplify their research from their home institutions, prioritizing dissemination through peer-reviewed publications and public engagements. Notably, findings are presented at a high-profile public event hosted at Panmure House, thus fostering an ecosystem of knowledge exchange among academics, policymakers, and the wider public. This strategic dissemination elevates research visibility and ensures that innovative ideas inform policy debates and business practices.
The 2025 Panmure House Prize winner, set to be announced later this year, exemplifies the global community’s commitment to fostering impactful scholarship that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In an era marked by profound economic and ecological challenges, the Prize champions visionary academics whose work reimagines economic frameworks through lenses of sustainability, innovation, and social responsibility.
By sponsoring this platform for intellectual rigor and transformative thinking, the Panmure House Prize reinforces the vital role of academic inquiry in shaping equitable and prosperous economic futures. As the finalists’ research demonstrates, addressing long-term challenges requires a synthesis of bold ideas, interdisciplinary approaches, and strategic stakeholder engagement. This confluence is essential to catalyzing the systemic transformations that 21st-century economies necessitate.
For scholars devoted to advancing the frontiers of economics and sustainable business, the Panmure House Prize represents both a generative challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. It crystallizes the imperative for research that not only advances theoretical knowledge but also embeds itself in the practical imperatives of corporate governance, public policy, and societal welfare, thereby shaping a resilient and inclusive global economy.
The Prize’s continuing legacy will no doubt inspire future generations of researchers and thought leaders to pursue innovation with a conscience, embracing long-termism as a guiding principle in the quest to resolve economic inequities and ecological constraints. This alignment of scholarship with societal impact underscores the transformative potential that well-supported academic ventures hold for the future of capitalism and human prosperity.
Subject of Research: Long-term economic thinking, sustainable capitalism, corporate investment behavior, open-source innovation, work-life balance, and business sustainability integration.
Article Title: Panmure House Prize 2025 Finalists Spotlight Pioneering Research in Sustainable and Long-Term Economic Innovation
News Publication Date: 2025 (exact date to be announced)
Web References:
https://www.panmurehouse.org/programmes/panmure-house-prize/
https://www.fcltglobal.org/
https://www.bailliegifford.com/
Image Credits: Heriot-Watt University
Keywords: Economics, Sustainable Capitalism, Long-term Investment, Open-source Hardware, Four-day Working Week, Corporate Sustainability, Innovation, Business Strategy, Economic Policy, Interdisciplinary Research
