Study: Median age for successful innovators in science, technology, engineering is 47

Want to be next Mark Zuckerberg and come up with a fresh innovation of your own? Well, a latest study suggested that you could be possibly as little like the Facebook co-founder as you can.

Contradicting the famous conception that innovation is generally driven only by young, technically skilled entrepreneurs, college dropouts to found a Silicon Valley startup, as new study said that the median age for successful innovators in the field of engineering, science, and technology is 47.

The presidential campaign is already roiled by the hot discussion of immigration and a debate regarding the H1-B skilled-worker visa program, it has turned out that 35% of successful innovators in such fields, often called STEM, took birth outside the US.

The new report released Wednesday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) suggested that they belong mainly to Europe and Asia.

In an interview, Robert Atkinson, the foundation’s president, who co-authored the report, said that there is lot of myths outside, murmurs that innovators in their 20s have been doing startups in Silicon Valley.

Mr. Atkinson added, “That’s really not what we found. For this type of science and engineering work, you must have much experience. But real major surprise was the importance of immigrants. We knew immigrants were part of STEM workforce, but fact that they were more important was surprising”.

Since long, the trend has been running, with a study published back in 2001 discovering that the number of foreign-born scientists serving in the US was roughly 18% in 1980, that number had gone up to over 1 in 4 in math and computer scientists and physical scientists, 10 years later.

However, the study on age of researchers when they are performing innovative tasks has been more mixed.