Harvard Business Review
August 24, 2012
If you want to remain relevant and advance your career in today’s global marketplace, you need to serve as an enabler of business growth and innovation. One of the best ways to do this is to adopt an “immigrant mindset.”
The immigrant mentality has proven time and again to accelerate careers and build enterprise. A study in 1996 from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) used the issuance of new patents to measure immigrants’ inventiveness and spirit of enterprise. Examining 250 recently-issued U.S. patents chosen at random, AdTI found that over 19% of them were issued to immigrants alone, or to immigrants collaborating with U.S.-born co-inventors. These patents generated more than 1,600 jobs. A 2011 study by Partnership for a New American Economy found that 76% of patents awarded to the top 10 patent-producing U.S. universities that year had at least one foreign-born inventor.
