Today's quote.

“That is why I insist that wealth in the age of flatness will increasingly gravitate to those countries who get three basic things right: the infrastructure to connect as efficiently and speedily as possible with the flat world platform, the right education programs and knowledge skills to empower more of their people to innovate and do value-added work on that platform, and finally, the right governance - that is, the right tax policies, the right investment and trade laws, the right support for research, the right intellectual property laws, and, most of all, the right inspirational leadership – to enhance and manage the flow with the flat world” pag. 328-9, The World is Flat. (Thomas L. Friedman, 2006)

This is a book, that I recomend to you all. It's one reading I have to do for one of my classes. I had to do a paper for some policy recommendations for Atlanta (Kommune) based on this book.

Of course I go by bike!

I am living 15 minutes walking to the University. Many people walk, but having lived in Denmark, I had to get a bike! There are not many people coming by bike, they come by public transportation, live on campus, or come by car. Here in the right, is a picture of the street I need to go every day. The fence at the left is part of the University. My apartment complex is somewhere behind the big skyscraper (312 meters).

Georgia Tech is somewhat similar to University of Aalborg, is a technical school, and around the same percentage of students are in engineering degrees. I am supposed to take classes around the subjects of Science and Technology, Innovation. There are many options to choose, and I enrolled in 4 classes. Our program is under the Public Policy department/school, instead of the Economics as is in Aalborg. So they offer many interesting classes about Public Policy. The classes that I took are: Science, Technology and Public Policy; Technology, Innovation & Policy; Public Policy Analysis, and finally Economics of Innovation. The classes here are interesting, and somewhat different from Aalborg (I am not saying that the classes in Aalborg are not interesting!).

In the class of Economics of Innovation, we are addressing the question, “The relationship between Innovation and Economic Growth”. The teacher is from Spain (like me!). There are 12 people in class, many of them PhD students, (as we can mix here in this school). There are only 2 Americans, 6 East Asians, and the rest from other places. Anyways, we are looking at different economic approaches, Classical, Neo-classical (formulas, models, etc…), and today we went over the Evolutionary approach. It really surprised that the people in class were really unrelated with these theories! They were all very interested. The teacher asked some questions, and for the first time in that class, I felt in a very good position (probably the best). I am very grateful to have attended at Aalborg, which has given me a very good perspective of economics, and not only the mainstream models.

In the next classes we are going to look also at the National Systems of Innovation approach. One lecture in the chapter is from Lundvall, how cool, right! Yesterday in another class, we quickly looked at an article from Bjorn Johnson about institutions.

I remember Ana Luiza (another student at Aalborg) told me that our School was much respected in many places. Now I can see that a lot.

Why Georgia Tech students cryed this last weekend? Georgia Tech lost against the University of Notre-Dame 14-10.