Chapter 2: Israel Ruiz

How has the Sapiens methodology influenced the world of engineering and education?

In this episode of “Connecting knowledge”, engineer Israel Ruiz, former vice president of MIT, tells us what the impact of Sapiens has been on his work and his thinking.

From his experience at MIT to the comparison between the American and Spanish educational models, Ruiz reveals how Sapiens has allowed him to ask deeper questions and arrive at richer answers. Why is it good to break patterns? What makes the Sapiens methodology applicable to any discipline, some as diverse as gastronomy, education or technology?

This is how Israel Ruiz sees universities and education in the Anglo-Saxon world and in Europe:

“University, or education in general, is designed as if there were lines, like if you jump into the pool and you can’t get out of your line. If what you want is to swim diagonally, in the pool you can’t. University and education in general is designed a little like this. Connecting knowledge happens at the very very very end, not at the beginning. At first you get on your line and you have to navigate your line. This works for many people, and it’s perfect for many people, because it guides them and allows them to move in a certain direction. But there are other people who really like to say: look, now I’m going to try this line, but then I would like to try another line… And it is difficult, it is very difficult to do this. There is a different concept in Anglo-Saxon education, in universities, than in European education. The Anglo-Saxons allow much more of this. We have to learn to do this more and more, because the world is much more transversal, much more interdisciplinary. The people who only take one lane or one degree, there aren’t that so many of those anymore. We need to be a little more open about how to do this”

About Israel Ruiz

Israel Ruiz was, from 2011 to 2020, the executive vice president and treasurer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the executive board of directors. He joined MIT in 2001, where he first was chief financial officer and vice president of finance. He studied Mechanical Industrial Engineering at the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (ETSEIB) of the Polytechnic University of Barcelona (UPC) and, after receiving a scholarship from la Caixa, he studied a master’s degree at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.