To your first comment, believe me I am as interested as you are in finding out the % of Sloan alums involved in those companies. I would love to do it but it would take quite some time to compile that data.

Anyway, I am curious to hear your hunch though.

The report you cited is excellent. My favorite statistic in there is that if all of the active companies founded by MIT alumni formed an independent nation, the revenues from these companies would give that nation anywhere from the 17th to 11th largest economy in the world (depending on how conservative your extrapolation of the survey data). This nation would edge out Sweden or Russia on a GDP basis.

Your point on the relative proportion of MIT companies started by Sloan students vs Engineering students is well taken. There is no arguing that the vast majority of the technology that powers these companies comes out of the world-class labs around campus – not Sloan.

That said, every single semi-finalist team in the Development Track of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition this year has at least one Sloan student on it (this is the track I run so I’ve got this info handy). Given that there are about 5.5 Science and Engineering students for each Management Student (http://web.mit.edu/facts/enrollment.html) Sloanies seem to be holding their own at least as far as the $100K is concerned.

While anecdotal, there are two recent MIT web startups that should be mentioned both for their early success and because the founding teams were all from Sloan. Hubspot (http://www.hubspot.com/) develops and sells an in inbound marketing system and Visible Measures (http://www.visiblemeasures.com/) quantifies how viewers interact with web video.

All this to say that founding teams can be just engineers, just MBAs, or a healthy mix of the two. But whether the engineers have a knack for business, the MBAs used to be CS/engineers (like 45% of Sloanies), or they have clearly defined roles, no company is going to make it unless they’re bringing something new to the market and they can sell it.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/kauffman-report2009.pdf

An interesting finding is that in the decade of the 1990’s, MIT *alumni* established roughly 10,000 companies.

This powerfully demonstrates the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT alumni.

It would be really interesting to know, though, how many Sloan alumni (vs., for example, Engineering alumni) were involved in these companies. I have my own hunch …

By the way, I believe that during a roughly comparable period, fewer than 300 companies were established based upon technologies licensed through the MIT TLO. That’s not a negative reflection on the MIT TLO. Rather, it’s a positive reflection on the true power of MIT and all universities: their alumni, and the knowledge and spirit that these alumni gain in the course of their education.