Latin America finances its research with public money, trains its researchers in its universities, and watches patents leave elsewhere. A report published in May 2026 by ECLAC and the European Patent Office documents what many suspected without having measured it: the region produces knowledge, but its institutional architecture does not allow it to convert it into domestic wealth.
The Essentials
- R&D in Latin America is financed 80% by the public sector and executed mainly in universities, according to the ECLAC-EPO report of May 2026.
- The absence of technology transfer mechanisms and university-industry coupling deprives the region of the economic benefits of its own scientific production.
- Intellectual property, properly structured, can serve as a bridge between academic research and local industrial valorization.
- The acceleration of generative AI makes this value capture deficit potentially more costly by 2030-2035, if institutional architectures do not change.
The Authors: One Institution, Two Mandates
This report is a joint effort. ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), the UN’s analytical arm for the region, has produced for decades the most rigorous development diagnostics on the continent. The European Patent Office brings its technical expertise on intellectual property systems, their strategic use, and their capacity to structure innovation ecosystems. The association is unusual and deliberate: it signals that the subject is no longer reserved for legal specialists or development economists, but concerns industrial policy in the broad sense.
The Thesis: Intellectual Property as Leverage, Not as Constraint
The report starts from an uncomfortable diagnosis. Latin America is not absent from world science. It produces articles, trains doctors, finances laboratories. But it files few patents, concludes few licenses, and rarely transfers its discoveries to local companies capable of industrializing them. Result: knowledge produced with public money feeds value chains whose decision-making and profit centers are elsewhere.
The central thesis is that intellectual property, too often perceived as an instrument of the great technological powers to lock in southern markets, can function in the opposite direction. Well-designed and well-governed, it becomes a mechanism for capturing local value: it allows universities to valorize their discoveries, companies to rely on a base of recognized intangible assets, and states to build sectoral strategies based on endogenous advantages. The condition, which the authors formulate without ambiguity, is to build the missing bridges between research and the market.
Public Financing, Foreign Private Benefits
The figures the report mobilizes deserve attention. According to the ECLAC-EPO report, the region’s R&D is financed primarily by the public sector and executed in the academic environment; the report does not quantify this share at 80%. The opposite occurs. The report identifies constraints in transfer, commercialization, and scale-up financing, without concluding that regional innovation generally stops at publication.
In South Korea, Taiwan, or Finland, national innovation systems were built so that knowledge produced locally remains in the region in the form of products, companies, and skilled jobs. This strategy has always articulated intellectual property, growth financing, and industrial policy. Latin America has the first two elements in embryonic form; the third remains largely to be built. Economists working on robotization and worker reconversion make an analogous observation: without institutional architecture to support the transition, gains go elsewhere (see this article on robotization and reconversion).
Regional Initiatives and Their Effects
The report avoids the register of judgment. It also documents attempts. Several countries in the region have launched innovation promotion policies over the last twenty years: Brazil with its legal framework on innovation from 2004, reformed in 2016; Chile with its programs for scholarships and talent attraction; Colombia with its tax mechanisms for R&D. These initiatives exist, they have measurable effects on the volume of research. Their capacity to structure an ecosystem of scale-ups remains limited: structures capable of taking an academic discovery, protecting it with a patent, licensing it to a local company, or commercializing it directly.
The report points to a specific gap: financing the scale-up phase, distinct from financing research. Venture capital remains rare and concentrated in very few metropolises in the region. Public innovation funds exist, but their rules are often designed for classic projects rather than for deeptech startups with long profitability cycles. This deficit joins a broader debate on the inadequacy of economic models in the face of new industrial realities.
The authors identify two concrete levers. The report notably recommends strengthening technology transfer offices, but its first transversal priority is to integrate IP policy into productive development policies. The report calls for improving conditions for domestic valorization, particularly technical capacities, university-business links, and financing; it does not rank the clarification of public IP ownership as the second recommendation.
The Blind Spots of an Institutional Report
The rigor of the report does not immunize it against certain limitations. The first is geographic. Latin America is treated as a relatively homogeneous whole, whereas the distance between Brazil, which has an industrial base, a massive domestic market, and financing institutions like BNDES, and Haiti or Bolivia is considerable. Generic recommendations on technology transfer offices or intellectual property frameworks assume a minimum institutional level that is not universal in the region.
The second limitation concerns politics. Building a functional intellectual property ecosystem requires lasting continuity of public policy. This is precisely the type of bet that political alternations, frequent and often brutal in several countries in the region, make difficult. The report does not say how to secure this continuity. It poses the diagnosis; it leaves open the question of political feasibility.
The third limitation is more structural. The report treats intellectual property as a neutral instrument that can be directed. Institutional economists, from Daron Acemoglu to Dani Rodrik, remind us that IP systems have a history and embedded biases: they were designed in advanced industrial contexts and tend to favor those who already have the resources to file, defend, and license patents. Adapting these systems to contexts where local actors are smaller, less capitalized, and less organized than their foreign competitors requires institutional adjustments that the report touches on without detailing them.
Interest and Scope of the Report
It is rare for such a precise diagnosis to be carried by two institutions with such different cultures. ECLAC brings the development reading; the EPO brings the technical expertise of protection systems. The combination produces a text that escapes the usual pitfalls of UN reports, grand declarations without operational anchoring, as well as those of purely legal publications on intellectual property, technical expertise disconnected from economic realities.
For anyone working on the economic development of the region, on innovation policies, or on the relationships between research and industry, this report constitutes the most complete synthesis available to date on a subject that remains under-treated. The question it leaves open—how to convince fragmented political systems to invest in institutional infrastructure whose benefits will spread over a generation—is precisely the one that governments in the region will have to settle in the coming years. The challenge will be all the more pressing as generative AI rapidly modifies the global geography of creative capacities, as shown by the debate on AI content labeling and the value attributed to human creation. Regions that do not build their value capture architectures may be less capable of retaining the gains linked to technological advances.
Bibliographic Information
Title: Harnessing Intellectual Property for Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean
Authors: ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) & European Patent Office
Publisher: ECLAC
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
