Giving Compass' Take:

• A child's potential to become a future inventor highly depends on their socioeconomic status and family background. Increasing access to innovative environments for kids has proved helpful for increasing the number of inventors in America. 

• How can schools facilitate and address more access to innovation for all students? How can families advocate for their own child's success? 

• Read more about America's lost einsteins. 

To maximize innovation and growth, all our brightest youth should have the opportunity to become inventors. But we found that a child’s potential for future innovation seems to have as much to do with the circumstances of their family background as it does with their talent.

We concluded that there are many “lost Einsteins” in America: children who had the ability to innovate, but whose socioeconomic class or gender greatly reduced their ability to tap into the social networks and resources necessary to become inventors.

Our first finding is that there are large differences in innovation rates by socioeconomic class, race, and gender. For instance, using new de-identified data that allows us to track 1.2 million inventors from birth to adulthood, we found that children born to parents in the top 1% of the income distribution are 10 times as likely to become inventors as those born to parents in the bottom half.

We also found that increasing exposure to innovation can be a powerful tool for increasing the number of inventors in America, particularly among women, minorities, and children from low-income families. Since underrepresented groups are likely to have fewer interactions with inventors through their families and neighborhoods, differences in exposure play a large role in these disparities. Indeed, our findings suggest that if young girls were exposed to female innovators at the same rate as boys are to male innovators, half of the gender gap in innovation would be erased.

Read the full article about lost einsteins by Xavier Jaravel by GOOD.