Students of technology, captains of industry?

Nick Ford
Lund University

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The final paper in my dissertation examines the contribution of technical higher education to entrepreneurial innovation. While entrepreneurship and inventive capacity are widely recognised as key drivers of economic growth, the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of formal education in fostering entrepreneurial and inventive activity is far from conclusive.

This study is a comparative analysis of two polytechnic institutes which opened in different parts of Scandinavia in 1829. These institutes are today known as Chalmers University of Technology (in Gothenburg, Sweden) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). While DTU was a university-level institute from inception, Chalmers initially started as a ‘craft school’ (slöjdskola), but progressed over time to become an institute of higher education. Chalmers’ evolution is characteristic of ‘academic drift’ — the tendency for professional and technical education to gradually move focus away from the practical to the theoretical.

Exploiting the convergence between Chalmers and DTU over the course of a century, I test the effect of differences in technical education on entrepreneurial innovation. To what extent did the graduates of Chalmers and DTU differ in their propensity to engage in entrepreneurial and inventive activity? How much did scientific, theoretical education support industrial innovation?

This analysis relies on the biographies of 7279 polytechnic and engineering graduates between 1829 and 1929. I extract data on the background of graduates, as well as their employment profiles. Using AI tools, I classify graduates’ careers into industries and identify both entrepreneurial and inventive activities: in the case of the former, whether a graduate established or owned a business; in the case of the latter, whether a graduate registered a patent or was otherwise described as an inventor.

My results reveal little difference between Chalmers and DTU graduates across the full period in their propensity to engage in either entrepreneurial or inventive activity. Among the earliest cohorts, DTU graduates were perhaps slightly more likely to establish or own a business than their peers from Chalmers. Likewise, DTU graduates in the mid- to late-nineteenth century were more likely to engage in inventive activity than Chalmers graduates. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, any differences between the two institutions had disappeared.

My findings suggest that scientifically grounded, theoretical higher education may be a more effective channel — or at least no worse a channel — for entrepreneurship and innovation than applied technical education. That is, academic drift was not unhelpful in fostering technical advances.