The technological imprinting of educational experiences on student startups

Abstract

The literature suggests that the startups of de novo entrepreneurs are disadvantaged, but many of the world's leading firms have been founded by students and recent graduates. We hypothesize that academic and industry-based educational experiences shape the innovative activity of student startups and use patent data to measure technological proximity between the patent portfolios of influencers and startups. We find that indirect exposure to the research and development activities of the students' university departments and work term employers results in technological imprinting. Influencer and entrepreneur capabilities affect the magnitude of the imprinting effect: student ventures are technologically more proximate to highly ranked university departments and to more innovative work term employers, and the students' software skills impact their ability to invent in proximity to their work term employer. We also find that multiple layers of imprints are complements, not substitutes. Exposure to inventive activities, even when indirect and brief, results in multiple capabilities-moderated layers of imprints.