Who Are America's Real Innovators? Surprising New Study Says They're Not Who You Think

Source FORBES

What do America’s innovators look like? While the stereotype may be Facebook FB -0.12% founder Mark Zuckerberg, the truth, according to a new study out today, couldn’t be more different.
Turns out many of the country’s successful innovators are older, come from highly educated immigrant backgrounds and rather than being 20-something Harvard dropouts, they’ve usually toiled for decades in their fields.
The study, released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, comes from a survey of 923 individuals who won significant awards for their innovations or applied for international patents (of the 6,418 innovators contacted.) It shows more than one-third (35.5%) of those surveyed were born outside the U.S. The median age at which they created their innovations? 47.
“ The idea that these guys just drop out of college and do amazing things in their 20s—that’s really not the norm ,” says Robert Atkinson, the ITIF president and co-author of the report, who points out that almost 60% had a Ph.D. in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
America’s innovators are often likely to be immigrants with advanced degrees who logged years of work in large companies, according to the report’s findings. “It takes a lot of acquired knowledge and a long period in their career to get good,” he says.

Women and U.S. born minorities were significantly “underrepresented,” among the innovators at just 12% and 8%, respectively. And African Americans represented just half a percent of U.S.-born innovators. (Of note, the share of foreign-born women innovators was 5% larger than U.S.-born.)

“The underrepresentation of women and minorities is very, very stark,” Atkinson say. How to bridge the gap? “There are lots of best practices out there for what universities and companies can do, we just need to do them better,” he adds.
Other Key Findings On America’s Innovators:

• Half of innovators majored in some type of engineering as an undergraduate
• Over 90% majored in science, technology, engineering and mathematics—STEM—degrees as an undergraduate
• Four-fifths of innovators earned at least one advanced degree
• 55% received a Ph.D. in so-called STEM fields
• Nearly 60% of private-sector innovations originate from businesses with more than 500 employees; 16% from companies with less than 25 employees
• About 20% credited collaborations for their innovations with 50% developing from public-private partnerships
• More than two-fifths of innovations represented in the study are available on the market and 25% of those have generated over $25 million in total revenue
• Approximately 30% of the respondents reported barriers to commercializing their innovations (9% cited regulatory challenges and 16% said “they lacked funding for further development efforts”)
• Innovation is concentrated in the Northeast, California and near “sources of public research spending;” California had the most innovations of any state, with innovations concentrated in Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego
• The mid-Atlantic and New England states tended to produce the most international patents in life sciences, materials sciences and information technology, with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Rhode Island leading
• Innovation winning awards clustered around public laboratories and prominent research universities, such as Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico, Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee and universities in Berkeley California and Cambridge, Massachusetts