The technologists in the innovation system. The role of human mobility

This paper is written as part of the research programme “FAKTA”, a large scientific programme with the aim of increasing the knowledge base for Norwegian research and innovation policy. The paper is part of the FAKTA project “Competencies, mobility and value creation”. Other papers from this project analyse researcher mobility, the structure of competencies of firms and the distribution and mobility of ICT-educated persons. This particular paper is in many ways parallel to the paper on ICT-educated persons but it looks at all persons with a mathematical, technological and other natural science educations as a whole. It also takes a closer look at the engineers since this type of education is seen as especially relevant for the innovative capacity of firms, sectors and consequently the national economy. There is no way that one from the educational classification itself can distinguish engineers, so using the title of the educations does this. Since the title “engineer” is fairly well standardised this should capture most of the “real” engineers, i.e. persons having an engineering type of education. Again it is the ITC educations that are most problematic since these educations – often being associated with mathematics or physics at the universities – often do not use the word engineer. At least this is not done in the education statistics, probably reflecting that Norwegians use the title “programmer” and only very seldom “software engineer”.