Innovation has long been one of the strongest drivers of the U.S. economy. From technology and medicine to engineering and scientific research, highly skilled workers help turn new ideas into products and discoveries. Research suggests that high-skilled immigrants play an especially important role in this process.
Immigrant Inventors Have an Outsized Impact
A study titled The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States, by Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade, and Beatriz Pousada, provides compelling evidence.
According to the study, immigrants represent about 16% of U.S. inventors but author approximately 23% of patents. The researchers’ model further estimates that immigrants are responsible for about 32% of aggregate U.S. innovation.
These numbers suggest that high-skilled immigrants contribute to innovation at a rate considerably higher than their share of the inventor population.
Their Impact Goes Beyond Patents
The contribution of immigrant inventors is not limited to their own inventions.
The researchers find that immigrant inventors help spread knowledge across international borders. They are more likely to draw on foreign technologies and collaborate across global inventor networks.
This international exchange of knowledge can give American companies and researchers access to ideas and expertise developed elsewhere.
Even more importantly, immigrant inventors can influence the productivity of the people working alongside them. The study finds stronger innovation spillovers from immigrant inventors to their collaborators than from U.S.-born inventors. More than half of the estimated 32% contribution to aggregate innovation comes from human-capital effects on U.S.-born collaborators.
Why High-Skilled Immigration Matters
These findings have important implications for discussions about high-skilled immigration in the United States.
Immigration policy is not simply about filling jobs. When the United States attracts scientists, engineers, researchers, and inventors from around the world, it may also gain new ideas, international connections, and knowledge that benefits other American workers.
This makes high-skilled immigration an important part of the broader conversation about America’s ability to remain competitive in science and technology.
Final Thoughts
The evidence suggests that immigrant inventors do more than create patents themselves. They also help connect the United States to global knowledge and strengthen the productivity of their collaborators.
For a country whose economic future depends heavily on innovation, attracting and retaining talented people from around the world could remain an important competitive advantage.
Most organizations understand that confidential documents should never be posted on the public internet. Yet the AI era introduces a subtler risk: valuable know-how can gradually escape through routine interactions with AI systems.
Every day, employees ask AI to:
Refine proprietary algorithms
Optimize manufacturing processes
Analyze customer behavior
Improve pricing strategies
Draft patent applications
Review source code
Summarize confidential research
Each prompt may reveal only a small piece of information. However, over months or years, these interactions can expose an organization’s unique methods, terminology, workflows, and decision-making patterns.
Even when AI providers state that enterprise customer data is isolated or not used for public model training under specific contracts, organizations must still carefully manage what information they share. Internal deployments, third-party integrations, misconfigured systems, or future changes in data governance policies can all introduce unexpected risks. The safest approach is to treat proprietary know-how as a strategic asset and establish clear governance over how AI systems are used.
Know-How: The Intellectual Property That Patents Can’t Fully Protect
When discussing intellectual property, patents often receive the most attention. Yet for many businesses, know-how is even more valuable.
Know-how includes:
Manufacturing techniques
Process optimization
Internal operating procedures
Supplier relationships
Customer engagement strategies
Quality control methods
Engineering experience
Lessons learned over years of experimentation
Unlike patents, know-how frequently derives its value from remaining confidential. Once widely disclosed, much of its competitive advantage may disappear.
Consider the formula for Coca-Cola, semiconductor fabrication techniques, or highly optimized industrial production methods. Their value lies not only in invention but also in the accumulated experience required to reproduce them consistently.
AI creates a new challenge because employees may unknowingly disclose fragments of this institutional knowledge while seeking productivity gains.
Patents provide inventors with exclusive rights for a limited period, but they require public disclosure. In exchange for protection, inventors must explain their invention sufficiently for others skilled in the field to understand it.
This trade-off has worked well for centuries because the patent system encourages innovation while eventually enriching the public domain.
However, many competitive advantages are intentionally never patented.
Companies often choose trade secret protection when:
Reverse engineering is difficult.
The innovation can remain confidential.
The commercial value may outlast the life of a patent.
The competitive edge lies in operational expertise rather than a single invention.
The danger in the AI era is that organizations may inadvertently weaken this trade secret protection by embedding confidential methods, prompts, workflows, or engineering knowledge into AI interactions without fully understanding where that information is stored, processed, or retained.
The Public Domain Effect
Knowledge naturally migrates toward the public domain over time through publications, patents, employee mobility, academic research, and market competition.
AI has the potential to accelerate this process.
As organizations increasingly rely on AI to solve technical problems, summarize internal documents, or generate software, a growing portion of proprietary expertise risks becoming encoded into broader AI-assisted workflows. While enterprise AI providers implement contractual and technical safeguards, the cumulative effect of widespread AI adoption is that unique organizational know-how may become easier to replicate across industries.
This does not necessarily mean that confidential information becomes publicly accessible. Rather, the uniqueness of proprietary expertise may gradually erode as AI systems help disseminate similar best practices, design patterns, and problem-solving approaches across many organizations.
The result is a shift in competitive advantage: companies may need to innovate continuously rather than relying solely on accumulated institutional knowledge.
Governance Is Becoming an Intellectual Property Strategy
Historically, intellectual property strategy focused on deciding whether to patent an invention or keep it as a trade secret.
Today, organizations face a third question:
What should employees be allowed to teach AI?
Answering this requires more than cybersecurity policies. It calls for AI governance frameworks that define:
Which information can be shared with external AI systems.
Which AI platforms are approved for sensitive work.
How prompts and outputs are logged and audited.
When private or on-premises AI models are required.
How trade secrets and know-how are preserved while still enabling AI-driven productivity.
In the AI economy, protecting institutional knowledge may become as important as protecting the inventions themselves.
For decades, fusion energy has been described as the “energy source of the future.” In 2026, that future appears closer than ever.
A series of major breakthroughs announced in the United States and the United Kingdom signal that fusion research is rapidly transitioning from scientific experimentation to commercial engineering. From record-setting electricity generation efficiency to advanced reactor infrastructure and modular reactor design, these developments address the three biggest barriers to commercial fusion: efficiency, cost, and maintainability.
Together, these milestones demonstrate that the global race to commercialize virtually limitless clean energy is entering a new phase.
Three Breakthroughs That Could Transform Fusion Energy
1. Realta Fusion Demonstrates Direct Electricity Generation
One of the most significant announcements came from Wisconsin-based startup Realta Fusion, which successfully powered lightbulbs directly from plasma inside its fusion reactor.
Unlike conventional power plants that convert heat into steam before generating electricity, Realta’s approach enables direct electricity conversion, potentially reaching efficiencies approaching 90%.
This method dramatically reduces energy losses associated with turbines and steam cycles while simplifying overall reactor design.
CEO Kieran Furlong described the achievement as proof that highly efficient fusion power generation is becoming technically achievable and economically viable.
If commercialized, direct energy conversion could fundamentally reshape the economics of fusion power plants.
2. General Atomics Expands America’s Fusion Infrastructure
California-based General Atomics secured $20 million in state tax credits to build a dedicated Fusion Blanket Component Test Facility in Poway, California.
While less visible than the reactor itself, the fusion blanket is one of the most critical components of a commercial fusion system.
Its responsibilities include:
Capturing enormous amounts of heat generated during fusion
Producing tritium fuel needed to sustain future reactions
Protecting reactor structures from high-energy neutron radiation
Improving overall reactor efficiency
Brian Grierson of General Atomics emphasized that the facility will bring together universities, national laboratories, and private companies to accelerate commercialization while strengthening California’s advanced manufacturing ecosystem.
Rather than another laboratory experiment, this investment represents the construction of essential industrial infrastructure required for future fusion power plants.
3. The U.K.’s STEP Project Reinvents Reactor Maintenance
Across the Atlantic, engineers working on the United Kingdom’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) program unveiled a patented modular reactor architecture designed to solve one of fusion’s most expensive operational challenges.
Traditional tokamak reactors are built as massive welded vessels that can require months of downtime for repairs or component replacement.
STEP replaces this approach with stacked ring-shaped reactor modules that can be individually removed and serviced.
The advantages include:
Faster maintenance cycles
Reduced operational downtime
Lower long-term operating costs
Easier technology upgrades
Improved reactor availability
Engineering Manager Roel Verhoeven explained that serviceability must be designed into reactors from the beginning if fusion plants are expected to operate continuously for decades.
The modular concept mirrors engineering practices used successfully in aerospace and advanced manufacturing, where maintainability is designed alongside performance.
Why These Developments Matter
Each breakthrough addresses a different obstacle that has historically delayed fusion commercialization.
Challenge
New Solution
Energy efficiency
Realta’s direct electricity conversion
Reactor infrastructure
General Atomics’ blanket testing facility
Maintenance costs
STEP’s modular tokamak design
Together, these innovations move fusion beyond theoretical physics and into practical engineering.
Commercial fusion will ultimately depend not only on producing plasma but also on generating electricity efficiently, operating reliably, and maintaining reactors economically.
These announcements demonstrate meaningful progress across all three fronts.
The Global Fusion Race Is Accelerating
Since the historic net-energy gain experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022, governments and private companies have dramatically increased investment in fusion technology.
Today, the competitive landscape includes:
United States
United Kingdom
China
European Union
Japan
South Korea
Numerous private fusion startups backed by billions of dollars in venture capital
The competition is no longer limited to achieving fusion ignition.
It has shifted toward solving the engineering challenges required to build commercially viable power plants capable of supplying reliable electricity to national grids.
Beyond Scientific Achievement
Fusion promises several transformational advantages over today’s energy systems.
Unlike fossil fuels, fusion produces no greenhouse gas emissions during operation.
Unlike conventional nuclear fission, fusion generates significantly less long-lived radioactive waste and carries no risk of runaway chain reactions.
Its fuel sources are abundant, and commercial reactors could eventually provide continuous, carbon-free baseload electricity with minimal environmental impact.
Achieving these goals, however, depends on overcoming engineering challenges as much as scientific ones.
The latest announcements from Realta Fusion, General Atomics, and the U.K.’s STEP program suggest that those engineering barriers are beginning to fall.
Looking Ahead
Fusion energy has long been viewed as one of humanity’s most ambitious technological pursuits.
Today, it is becoming an industrial reality.
Realta Fusion has demonstrated more efficient electricity generation directly from plasma. General Atomics is investing in the infrastructure needed to validate critical reactor components. The STEP project is reimagining reactor architecture to improve maintainability and reduce costs.
Individually, each breakthrough is significant.
Collectively, they indicate that fusion is progressing from laboratory science toward commercial deployment.
While widespread fusion power remains several years away, these developments represent meaningful progress toward a future where virtually limitless, clean, and reliable energy could transform the global economy.
The race to commercial fusion is no longer defined solely by scientific discovery—it is increasingly being won through engineering innovation.
The US has developed a critical minerals price floor system that it’s pitching to allies as the Trump administration and more than 50 countries look to reduce dependence on China for the resources that are deemed critical to national security.
Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg said multiple US agencies have developed the system and are having conversations with allies and partners. It’s the latest update to progress being made by the US and its allies to ringfence Western companies from China’s pressure on those markets.
