 What's the optimal way to diversify an economy? For more than a decade, we have known that economies are more likely to enter related economic activities. This means that a country, city, or region is more likely to start producing products, industries, and patents that are similar to the ones they've produced in the past. But does this mean that economies should focus their efforts only on things that are similar to what they know? Or should they try to break the pattern and focus on more adventurous bats? In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, a team of scholars from MIT and Caliphide University studied this question. They looked at the total time that it would take an economy to diversify to all possible economic activities, using different diversification strategies. One strategy was to simply focus on the most related activities, the lowest hanging fruit. Another was to focus on the most connected activities, the ones that can increase the chances to enter other activities. What they found was that strategies focused only on related activities were sub-optimal. This means that focusing only on highly related products is bad economic development advice. In fact, they found that the strategies that were most effective to diversify an economy were dynamic, meaning that they changed at different stages of development. For economies with low levels of industrial diversity, focusing on the most related activities is good. At that stage, risky endeavors are likely to fail, and it is better to build capacity slowly but surely. At some point, economies enter a more diverse stage. This is the time when they need to switch strategies and focus on activities that are less related and more connected. These risky efforts can slow down the diversification process momentarily, but will provide the basis for more rapid development in the future. In later stages, economies should focus again on related activities. This time because the most sophisticated activities are now also the activities that are also closely related. The scholars also compared their model with the empirical behavior of countries in the networks of related products and related research areas. They found that the behavior of countries was not too far from the optimal behavior of the model. Yet, countries were too ambitious at low levels of development and too conservative during the optimal window. These findings are helping us understand how economies diversify their activities and how to think about economic development strategy.