The Innovation Program
Thanks to Hephaestus Heavy Industries opening the floodgates, more than a million new companies were registered in a very brief time. And following that, millions of patents for space-related equipment, ranging from cups and other dishes that were designed to incorporate gravity plating to ensure they didn’t spill during heavy maneuvers all the way to prospective capacitor banks and engines.
It wasn’t that the empire had released their technology to the public domain, but rather that people were allowed to incorporate the tech in their design as a kind of “black box” piece that they could license from the empire. The only requirement was that, if a design incorporated publicly known empire technology, the resulting object could only be manufactured by HHI. That was in the licensing agreement, and no negotiation on that clause would be accepted at all.