With Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as its most emblematic figures, the narrative of the college dropout who left school to start a tech company that went on to make billions of dollars and change the world has become a popular one.
But when it comes to who’s regularly innovating at the highest levels in the United States, that particular narrative is also a misleading one.
Most innovators are in their late 40s, hold advanced degrees in STEM fields, attended a public university and work at large companies, not the small startups.
And more than a third of U.S. innovators were born on foreign soil, and a similar amount completed their undergraduate education at a foreign college or university.
That’s according to “The Demographics of Innovation in the United States,” a new report released Wednesday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
“Why do we care about this? Because there’s an awful lot of assumptions about who are these people who are involved with innovation in this country,” Robert D. Atkinson, president of ITIF, said Wednesday during a panel discussion on Capitol Hill titled “Who Are America’s Innovators and How Can We Help Them?”
While many tend to think of innovators as young folks at Silicon Valley startups, “that’s not really what we found,” Atkinson said.
