Entrepreneurs are among the most celebrated people in our culture. Celebrity entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, often grace the covers of prominent publications. These company founders and innovators fuel economic growth and give the nation its competitive...

Foreign national students have come to the United States to study in increasing numbers and participated in some of the most advanced academic research efforts to date, lending enormous brainpower to the development of technological and scientific innovations that benefitted America. The...

A 2012 ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARMany of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small...

Our previous research had documented that 52% of Silicon Valley's startups were founded by immigrants; that immigrants were contributing to 25% of WIPO PCT applications filed from the U.S.; the backlog of skilled immigrants waiting for permanent resident visas had increased to over 1 million...

Women are one particularly understudied group of entrepreneurs. We know very little about female entrepreneurs, and our ignorance of this important demographic is a serious blind spot in any effort to increase the total number of entrepreneurs participating in our economy. What little we do know...

The popular image of American tech entrepreneurs is that they come from elite universities: Some graduate and start companies in their garages; others drop out of college to start their business careers. The dot-com boom reinforced the image of technology CEOs being young and brash. But, even...

The founders of the United States considered intellectual property worthy of a special place in the Constitution - "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In...

The period of unprecedented expansion of immigrant-led entrepreneurship that characterized the 1980s and 1990s has come to a close. Today, the growth rate of immigrant-founded companies nationwide, at 24.3 percent, has plateaued. In the high-tech hub of Silicon Valley, the proportion of...

This purpose of this research was to assess the contribution of skilled immigrants in the creation of engineering and technology businesses and intellectual property in the United States. We found there was at least one immigrant key founder in 25.3% of all engineering and technology companies...