How we get to next - blog by Matt Locke:
Young inventors need role models, not tax breaks
16 December 2016
A conversation with MIT’s John Van Reenen
When we talk about innovators, we normally talk about how someone becomes one—not when. We talk about the success or failure of their experiments, products, and companies, and the gradual accrual of hard-earned experience that led to their breakthrough. We define innovators by the things they make, but rarely talk about the things that made them. That might be because doing so brings up some uncomfortable truths: In the United States, “If your parents are the top one percent of the income distribution, then you’re 10 times more likely to grow up to be an innovator than if you’re born in the bottom 50 percent. That’s a huge difference,” says John Van Reenen, a professor in MIT Economics & Sloan. Van Reenen is leading “The Lifecycle of Inventors,” a data-based research project looking at how the early lives of innovators affected their careers. Working with a team from Harvard, Stanford, and the U.S. Treasury, he’s looked at 1.2 million people who applied for or were granted a U.S. Patent between 1994 and 2014, and correlated this data with their education and family financial records.