Guest blog by Nuru Suleymanov, LEG ’23
I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to participate in this unique course, during which leading scholars and practitioners Professor Matt Andrews and Professor Ricardo Hausmann, as well as other members of the Harvard Kennedy School team, shared with us their valuable experience, knowledge and insights in the field of economic growth and inclusive development.
The professionalism with which the course program was compiled deserves special attention. The organizers managed to highlight all the essentials from a huge number of documents, articles, studies and practices on the problems of ensuring economic growth and development, factors stimulating growth, tools for diagnosing problems, developing and implementing growth strategies, in order to create a holistic view of the problems among course participants growth, ways to solve them, and also instill some practical skills in this area in a relatively short period of time.
Over the course of ten weeks, I became more clear about the factors limiting the possibilities for sustainable growth in our country, the ways and mechanisms for eliminating them, the role of statistical data for diagnosing problems and assessing the results of implementing growth strategies, the activities and steps taken by the government and its individual agents for the development of the country. I discovered a lot of useful things for myself in this course, things that can be applied both to solving global growth challenges and in everyday life.
The main ideas that I took away from this course are that developing a growth strategy and executing it is a team effort that requires commitment and a willingness to put in every effort to achieve a common goal among all team members.
The team/organization dealing with the problem of ensuring growth should be High Bandwidth, provide feedback between the actors of the process, learn in the process of solving problems, in order to use the accumulated experience for further activities.
To effectively implement a growth strategy, the three A conditions must be met (Authority, Acceptance, Ability).
The PDIA approach is an effective tool for solving problems, developing and implementing growth strategies.
High-technology production, complexity, attraction and development of know-how, inclusiveness, development and implementation of “green” technologies, government support for the necessary institutional environment and infrastructure are important factors for growth and sustainable development.
The Atlas of Economic Complexity, developed by Growth Lab, is a unique development for analyzing the identification of problems and assessing the prospects for economic growth of a country.
In general, the course gave a feeling of possessing knowledge that, if further reinforced with additional materials and practice, will be sufficient, if necessary, to organize work to solve growth problems.
I hope to use the ideas gained from this course to contribute to solving the problems of sustainable economic growth and the further development and prosperity of Azerbaijan.
I would like to sincerely thank my team members for organizing, supporting and creating an excellent environment for comfortable communication and learning.
I am also grateful to my partners, members of the “Change Impact” team for interesting discussions, the opportunity to get to know their vision of the problems of growth, discuss alternative visions, approaches to solving problems, excellent teamwork and support.
It is impossible not to note the instructor’s encouraging and apt comments on our assignments, which unobtrusively directed our reasoning in the right direction. Thank you for your support Santiago!
All the Best!
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 58 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2023. These are their learning journey stories.