Fascinating:

    ... China ... the first party-approved science fiction and
    fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I
    took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been
    disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

    It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making
    things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not
    innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they
    sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google,
    and they asked the people there who were inventing the future
    about themselves. And they found that all of them had read 
    science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Just an anecdote, of course, but this would be a wonderful "proper" study - to look at the correlation between early SF readers, and "makers" versus "workers".

Correlation doesn't imply causation, etc, etc, but it does suggest an interesting and intriguing possibility.