Cesar A. Hidalgo

“arrived in the U.S. not through an instruction manual or as an abstract idea, but inside the brain of a gutsy 21-year-old”

“knowledge is not really in a place. It does not diffuse through a continuous fluid like the air, but through the discrete units we call people.”

“They showed that the odds of a patent citing another one was 150 times larger when the inventors had a history of direct collaboration, and 16 times larger when they shared at least one common co-inventor.”

“confirm that no one to whom he had spoken had succeeded in building a TEA laser using written sources, including preprints and internal reports, as the sole source of information.”

“As one of his interviewees admitted, publications are enough to show that you've done something, but never enough to enable anyone else to do it.”

“concluded that the transfer of complex and partly tacit knowledge requires apprenticeships and face-to-face interactions.”

“Going down to individuals was important to us because individuals are more constrained by their expertise than countries or universities, so we should expect the links of a network built on individual level to be more representative of shared expertise. As we expected, Miguel found out that at the individual level, the effect of relatedness was considerably larger than the one we observed for universities and countries.”

“The general point is that when success requires simultaneously meeting multiple criteria, failure can result from missing only one of them.”

“adopting a set of best practices, is not the same as having good judgment. In fact, best practices can grossly backfire when they are applied in the wrong context. Good judgment cannot be reduced to recipes.”

“They are now back at the beginning of the learning curve, this time with a more complex regulatory environment and a more intricate underground.”

“there are critical capacities like building subways and nuclear plants that a country should keep active for strategic reasons.”

“Each of us carries only a few letters, but together we get to move those letters around and discover new letters and combinations.”