Principles of Collective Learning

The Growth, Diffusion, and Valuation of Knowledge

Winter 2025

Synopsis:

How do teams, cities, and nations learn? How do they acquire the knowledge they need to improve their capacities or enter new activities? This course will equip students with a basic understanding of the mechanisms that govern the creation and diffusion of knowledge and the tools needed to study these mechanisms. By the end of this course, students will be equipped with a basic understanding of a century’s worth of research on the temporal and spatial dynamics of knowledge and with a practical understanding of some of the tools used to study its growth, diffusion, and valuation.

This course will cover multiple aspects of collective learning, from the organizational learning literature focused on firms and teams, to recent work on economic complexity studying knowledge accumulation and diffusion among cities and nations.

This course is divided into five units.

The first unit motivates the study of knowledge using practical policy examples and then moves to an introduction of the characteristics that make the study of knowledge both interesting and challenging (non-fungibility, non-rivalry, tacit and explicit knowledge, architectural knowledge, transactive memory, etc.).

The second unit focuses on the temporal accumulation of knowledge (e.g. learning curves, progress curves, experience curves, forgetting curves), on the connection between different types of learning curves (e.g. disruptive innovation theory), and on the mechanisms that make transitions among learning curves difficult (e.g. architectural knowledge).

The third unit focuses on the diffusion of knowledge across geographies, social networks, and activities, and will review classic and recent research on the role of migrants and social networks on the diffusion of knowledge together with the key concepts needed to understand knowledge diffusion, such as the idea of absorptive capacity.

The fourth unit will explore methods to quantify the value of knowledge agglomerations that can help explain national and international variations in economic growth, inequality, and emissions.

The fifth and final unit will focus on policy implications and broader lessons.

INSTRUCTOR:

César A. Hidalgo PhD
Professor,
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences,
Toulouse School of Economics

SCHEDULE:

Mondays 2:00pm-3:30pm
Fridays 11am-12:30pm

FIRST DAY OF CLASS:

January 13, 2025

ROOM:

Room 1, Basement floor of TSE main building

COURSE NUMBER:

This is course is not for credit

EVALUATION:

This is a not for credit course. To support the learning outcomes, students will be given a problem set and will be asked to discuss readings during the Friday lectures.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

At the end of the course students will be able to conduct data driven analyses of the capabilities and diversification opportunities of regional and national economies. The students will also obtain a working understanding of topics on innovation studies, economic geography, and economic complexity that will serve as a segue to consulting or policy oriented work.

READINGS:

The course will follow my upcoming book: The Infinite Alphabet and the references cited therein. All students will get a hardcopy of the book starting on the second week of class.