Why is it that some places, like Silicon Valley in California or Zhongguancun in Beijing, become successful hubs of innovation, while efforts to cultivate knowledge elsewhere consistently fail? What truly governs how knowledge is created, how it moves between people and places, and why it ultimately decays?

On Monday 17 November César Hidalgo joined Tony Curzon Price to discuss his new book The Infinite Alphabet: and the Laws of Knowledge. César is a global leader in his field: a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence.

Hidalgo’s original research reveals three underlying principles that govern how knowledge grows, moves, and decays – laws of time, space and value – which show how it is accumulated and lost; how it spreads across geographies, brains and social networks; and how it aggregates, creating economic value in countries, cities and organisations and why it decays.