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(upbeat calm music)
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To compete in a fast-changing
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business environment, organizations have to constantly
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learn how to do things better.
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Like executing key-business processes more efficiently
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or crafting smarter strategies for success.
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Of course each individual an the organization
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is responsible for continually strengthening their skills
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and knowledge, but collective learning
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is where the real action is.
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What is collective learning exactly?
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And why does it matter more than ever
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for organizations today?
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Collective learning is the understanding of how teams
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cities, organizations, and nations learn
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It's the acquisition of knowledge not by individuals
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but by groups of people.
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Companies stay in business
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because they have some knowledge that is in some way unique
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that allows them to participate in a market
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that few other people can participate, that allows them
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to produce a product, that few that people can produce
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and therefore they have some sort of temporal monopoly.
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Acquiring that knowledge, it's vital for companies.
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As it turns out, you can measure how much
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collective learning is taking place at the levels of teams,
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cities, and even entire industries and countries,
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but only if you use the right metrics.
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I've begun to study how knowledge accumulates
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at the collective level, how much knowledge that the city
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of Berlin has vis-à-vis Paris or Tokyo or New York.
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And I developed two measures that can help us understand
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how knowledge moves and what is the intensity of knowledge
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that exist in a location.
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The first one is quite simple and it's an idea
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that is now known as relatedness.
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This is the distance, you know, in the knowledge that exists
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in a city and the knowledge that is required by an industry.
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So, it would answer the question, you know, how far is Miami
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from the biotech sector? Or how close is Tokyo, you know,
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from the musical instrument manufacturing industry?
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And what you can do is you can look at all of the industries
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that are present in a location.
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You can see how related they are to the industries
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that are not yet present.
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And those measures are very predictive of the industries
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that a city or a country are gonna enter or exit
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in the future.
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And this is true for the products that our country
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is gonna export, the technologies in which a city is gonna
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patent, the research areas in which our university
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is gonna publish and so forth.
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(upbeat music)
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The second idea is a measure of all of the knowledge
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that would be containing a city and how that affects
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important macroeconomic outcomes, economic growth,
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you know and income inequality.
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These tools help you understand a couple of things.
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First, you know, you would know which activities
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are more likely to be successful at given the capabilities
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that you already have.
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(pensive orchestration)
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Every company can benefit by taking the time
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to understand how much knowledge is concentrated
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in a particular industry or geographic location.
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And how it's being built up through collective learning.
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Why?
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When you understand these things,
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you can make some pretty interesting predictions
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and you can use those predictions to make crucial
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business decisions like which markets your company
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should enter and which markets you should avoid.
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You can predict, you know, which are the markets
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that might grow in the future.
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You can also predict the success that each one
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of those markets might have in the sectors
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that you might be interested on entering.
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Leadership for a long time, you know,
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has been very intuitive and it's intuitive for a reason.
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You know, people that have been operating in a sector
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or an industry for a long time, they have good hunches
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about what works and what doesn't work
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because they have a lot of experience.
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As data becomes a more prevalent aspect of our lives
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and our work, it means that there's gonna be leaders
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that are gonna have looked at more data throughout
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their lives, and that's gonna give them a richer
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intuition and a richer set of experience to draw upon.
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Clearly collective learning can give companies
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some vital advantages, but to capture those advantages,
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companies need a new type of leader.
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What do these leaders do differently?
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How do they enable collective learning in their teams?
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And how do they help remove roadblocks to collective
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learning that arise as their organizations grow?
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In our next video, Cesar Hidalgo offers insights
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into these questions.
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So the most important ability, anybody needs to learn
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you know, is the ability to learn.