Study Finds Engineers Far More Likely than MBAs to Build and Run Companies (identified.com)
In our latest edition of the “Revenge of the Nerds” white paper research series, Identified has discovered that a growing number of company founders and CEOs today are far more likely to hold advanced engineering degrees than MBAs and that the overall age of business leaders is steadily trending downward. We see this shift as a significant impact on corporate culture with younger, more technically inclined entrepreneurs at the helm.
We culled through 36 million professional profiles in the Identified database and found 3,337 founder/CEOs have an advanced engineering background compared with 1,016 MBAs. The ratio of undergrad business and engineering founders/ CEOs is about even (9,461 versus 9,334), a significant shift occurs in the number of leaders who have advanced degrees.
Founders are also getting younger, with the average age dropping to around 33 years old from 36 in 2008, based on an analysis of Facebook profile data, 90 percent of which is US based.
The ‘nerd-inspiring’ success story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a possible foundation for more engineers launching new endeavors, particularly in the IT, social and mobile industries.
Our study tracked the Identified Scores of engineers to discover where some of the top talent could be found studying. International programs such as the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Canada’s University of Waterloo and China’s Tsinghua University joined the list of usual suspects like Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CalTech and Carnegie Mellon.
