In an ambitious three-day working group organized by SFI Cowan Professor Ricardo Hausmann and Harvard collaborator Dany Bahar, experts will try to understand how individuals, organizations, and nations create and transmit knowledge across the boundaries that separate them.
Naively, it appears knowledge is easy to transmit; as soon as you write something down you can post it on the Internet, where it spreads at the speed of light.
“But the amazing thing is how incredibly local knowledge is,” says Hausmann, and how limited and narrow the channels can be through which knowledge flows.
Hausmann cites sports as an example. Tennis players must react quickly to serves. A good player knows where to be, how to hit the ball, and where to place it. Passing that knowledge on is another story.
“They know how to do it, but they don’t know how it is that they know how to do it,” says Hausmann, and without that, transmitting know-how is impossible.
Similar thinking “explains part of the puzzle about why poor countries have so much trouble catching up to rich countries,” he says. “It’s because know-how travels through these extremely narrow channels that we’re just starting to understand.”
“There are many areas in which people in their fields are saying that knowledge is the key variable, but they’re analyzing it at very different scales, at very different levels, and with very different paradigms,” Hausmann says.
The working group June 10-12 will bring those people together to move toward a more comprehensive understanding of knowledge.
This meeting is invitation-only.
More about the working group here