Education Week online:
Can schools help uncover `Lost Einsteins? in next generation of inventors?
11 December 2017
At nearly 326,000, the number of new U.S. patents has more than doubled from 2005 to 2015. But in every year since 2008, the patents granted to foreign inventors have outpaced those of U.S. inventors, and a new study suggests the nation could be overlooking thousands of potential young inventors. As part of the ongoing Equality in Opportunity Project, researchers from Harvard and Stanford Universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics, and the U.S. Treasury Department analyzed data from 1.2 million inventors, using patents issued from 1996 to 2014, linked to tax records, to trace the role of early grades and environment to their later innovation. The working paper was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Related publications
‘Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation’, Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen, mimeo, December 2017
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf