Parents' Shop Talk Can Give Entrepreneurial Kids A Boost Later

An entrepreneur who follows his father into an established industry is likely to enjoy greater success than peers whose parents didn't work in that field, recent research suggests. At the same time, innovative, high-IQ entrepreneurs are more likely to strike out on their own in search of greater rewards, researchers found after analyzing statistics on young and middle-aged Norwegian men and businesses started in Norway from 1999 to 2007. Their findings indicate that different advantages – inherited industry knowledge for some, great intellectual talent for others – take entrepreneurs on different paths to different kinds of success. "A majority of male entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers' industry of employment," the researchers wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper issued early this year. "This tendency is correlated with intelligence: higher-IQ entrepreneurs are less likely to follow their fathers," they said. In fact, the authors found that entrepreneurs with higher cognitive test scores are far more likely to go into the tech industry.