Selection of top 100 inventions with US involvement highlighted | McKinsey

McKinsey: The United States has led the invention of new products, systems, and technologies over the past 250 years.

America’s ‘can-do’ spirit

From its inception to this day, the United States has had an entrepreneurial culture that has served as an ongoing foundation for competitiveness. By some accounts, entrepreneurs and inventors have been “cultural heroes” throughout US history. Entrepreneurship in America —often supported by wealth earned from its resources—has meant a willingness to take risks, an embrace of new ideas and people, and a drive for economic progress. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840: “America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

The culture of entrepreneurship stems at least in part from the absence of Europe’s entrenched societal structures and systems; the United States was able to start fresh. Perceived openness and economic opportunity have attracted many of the world’s best minds over the country’s history. In the second chapter, for example, immigrants brought new ideas and had an outsize impact on innovation; migrants from this era were more than 1.5 times likelier to file a patent than their US-born peers. Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland, famously started a steel empire that became the world’s largest corporation. This phenomenon has endured.