Harvard Business Review: Immigrants play ‘outsize role’ in technology and innovation – Daily Kos

Immigrants accounted for a little under 20 percentof all inventors during the late 19th and early 20th century, notesthe Harvard Business Review, with that numbersurgingto approximately 30 percent today.Their research is clearimmigrants are playing an outsize role in technology and innovation:

The largest share of immigrants were involved in developing medical technology inventions, such as surgical sutures. But medical technology accounted for just 1% of all U.S. patents. In areas that had a much larger effect on the U.S. economy at this time specifically electricity and chemicals, which accounted for 13.9% and 12.6% of all U.S. patents respectively immigrants were also strongly represented. Migrant influence was widespread, with migrant inventors accounting for at least 16% of patents in every technology area. The majority of immigrant inventors originated from European countries, with Germans playing a particularly prominent role.

Areas of technology with higher levels of foreign-born expertise experienced much faster patent growth between 1940 and 2000 than otherwise comparable technology areas, in terms of both the number of patents and a citation-adjusted measure of patent quality. That relationship isnt necessarily causal, however our results provide suggestive evidence that immigrant inventors played a key role in the development of Americas technology leadership.

Migrant inventors may have an outsized influence on innovation for two primary reasons. First, immigrant inventors like Nikola Tesla, who was born in Serbia, develop important ideas in their own right. Additionally, their insights may augment the skills of domestic inventors through collaboration. For example, in the 1940s Canadian immigrant James Hillier developed the first commercially viable electron microscope at Radio Corporation of America alongside Ladislaus Marton, a Belgian inventor, Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian inventor, and U.S.-born engineers.

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Harvard Business Review: Immigrants play 'outsize role' in technology and innovation - Daily Kos