[1] The book attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge that each country holds, by visualizing the differences between national economies.

[5] The Atlas was a collaboration between the Center for International Development at Harvard University and the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab.

In 2013, Harvard's Center for International Development released an independent version of the platform, entitled The Atlas of Economic Complexity.

The Harvard version builds on the original code base developed by Alex Simoes at the MIT Media Lab and uses a different method for cleaning the data than the OEC.

Combined, this results in coverage of over 6000 products worldwide, with coloured dots representing exports of $100 million.