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Rob Rodrigues 1 Daniela Fernandes 2
In 2026 the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) released the National Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation (ENCTI) 2024–2034, subtitled For a fair, developed, and sovereign Brazil. The document is Brazil's principal instrument of long-term strategic planning for science and technology policy, with a ten-year horizon and an explicit ambition: to convert science, technology and innovation (ST&I) from a sectoral policy into what the Strategy repeatedly calls a state policy — an infrastructure of national development as critical as energy, logistics or defence.
For intellectual property scholars and practitioners, the ENCTI is not an IP document, and it would be a mistake to read it as one. It is, however, the framework within which Brazil's industrial property, technology transfer and access-and-benefit-sharing regimes will be justified, funded and reformed over the coming decade. Its silences are as instructive as its commitments.
The ENCTI 2024–2034 was published jointly by the MCTI and the Center for Management and Strategic Studies (CGEE), the social organisation that supplies strategic intelligence to the Ministry, and its presentation is signed by Minister Luciana Santos.
The substantive drafting fell to a Working Group coordinated by the MCTI Executive Secretary, Luis Manuel Rebelo Fernandes, with the Secretariat for Strategic Policies and Programs. Its composition explains both the document's breadth and its diplomatic register: alongside the Ministry sat the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), the National Confederation of Industry (CNI) with two seats, the funding and research agencies CNPq, Finep and CGEE, the federative bodies Confap and Consecti, and representatives of innovative companies, federal university rectors and graduate students.
1 Partner. LL.M. in Law, Science, and Technology, from Stanford Law School. 2 Attorney. Master's candidate in International Law at Rio de Janeiro State University.
The Strategy draws its political legitimacy from the 5th National Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation, held in 2024 after a fourteen-year interval and complemented by a national public consultation and sectoral dialogues. It is, however, deliberately programmatic: indicators, intermediate targets, institutional responsibilities, funding arrangements and monitoring mechanisms are all deferred to a subsequent five-year Action Plan for Science, Technology and Innovation (PACTI). Anyone looking for enforceable commitments — including on IP — must wait for that instrument.
The Strategy's candour about Brazil's innovation performance is one of its strengths. National R&D expenditure rose from roughly 1% to nearly 1.2% of GDP over two decades — modest growth, and far below the trajectory of the United States, Germany, China and South Korea. The structural problem is identified precisely: in 2023, Brazilian private-sector R&D (0.6% of GDP) was roughly twice government R&D (0.27%). In the United States, an identical level of government investment leveraged private R&D of 2.7% of GDP — a tenfold multiplier. In South Korea the multiplier was eightfold; in China and Germany, fivefold.
The Strategy also records that Brazil fell two positions in the 2025 Global Innovation Index, to 52nd, losing its Latin American leadership to Chile. The use of a WIPO-produced benchmark as the headline measure of national innovation performance is itself a datum of interest for IP scholarship.
The diagnosis, then, is not that Brazil produces too little science. It is that the country has never solved the translation problem: a persistent disconnect between scientific capacity and its application in business activity, compounded by weak technology absorption in small and medium enterprises, discontinuous funding for startups and deep-tech firms, and the absence of long-term national innovation targets.
Part II of the Strategy organises action around four axes.
The first of these looks inward, at the expansion, consolidation and integration of the national ST&I system (SNCTI), where priority areas are sorted according to three guiding criteria: global leadership, claimed in renewable energy, bioeconomy, agriculture and food security and health; scientific excellence; and strategic intervention, invoked for artificial intelligence, quantum computing and new materials. Education, the Amazon and international cooperation cut across all of them.
The second axis moves from the research system to the productive one, tying business innovation and reindustrialisation on new technological foundations to the six missions of the Nova Indústria Brasil (NIB) policy, which range from sustainable agro-industrial chains and the Health Economic-Industrial Complex (CEIS) to sustainable infrastructure, sanitation, housing and mobility, the digital transformation of industry, bioeconomy and decarbonisation, and technologies for sovereignty and defence.
Where the second axis is organised by opportunity, the third is organised by exposure: strategic projects for national sovereignty are ranked by degree of vulnerability, running from semiconductors and ICT, strategic minerals, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and fertilisers through to radioisotopes, the nuclear programme and the space sector. The fourth axis closes the sequence by turning ST&I towards social development — food security, health and well-being, productive inclusion, mobility and safety, and the popularisation of science — with social innovation presented not as a residual concern but as the complement of technological innovation.
Stripped of rhetoric, the ENCTI's approach to innovation rests on six operative moves.
The first is mission orientation. The Strategy explicitly adopts mission-driven planning, borrowed from the international policy literature and from the analysis of China's ST&I plans to which the document devotes a section of its own, so that priorities are defined by national challenges rather than by disciplinary fields. That choice only makes sense if private money follows, which is the second move: the headline target of 2% of GDP in R&D by 2034 is presented as achievable only through a substantial expansion of business investment. Twelve foundational actions are listed to that end, among them treating public ST&I funding as strategic capital investment immune to freezes and contingenciamento, guaranteeing the full annual release of FNDCT revenues, expanding the credit capacity of Finep and BNDES, and improving the reach and effectiveness of the existing tax incentive framework — the “Lei do Bem” (Good Law) and the “Lei de Informática” (IT Law).
Behind both sits a proposed change in how innovation is classified for fiscal and regulatory purposes. Two related proposals recur throughout the document: that R&D be treated as investment rather than expenditure, with specific tax rules to match, and that ST&I activities be governed by a differentiated regulatory framework recognising their experimental and high-risk nature.
From this follows the call for improvement and consolidation of the “Marco Legal de CT&I”, for the reduction of bureaucratic barriers, and for greater institutional flexibility in managing public and private resources. Supply-side support of this kind is then completed on the demand side, where the strategic use of state purchasing power — including encomenda tecnológica, or technology procurement — is described as the missing element that closes the cycle of public support for business innovation.
The remaining two moves concern the environment in which innovation happens. The Strategy recommends establishing experimental regulatory environments, or sandboxes, across the priority areas of all four axes; and it proposes an architecture for the ecosystem itself, in the form of an Integrated National Network of Innovation Ecosystems connecting technology parks, incubators and local productive arrangements, alongside hybrid financing and co-investment mechanisms designed to attract private capital and share technological risk — with explicit attention to the geographic concentration of Brazilian innovation environments.
Direct references to intellectual property in the ENCTI are few but strategically placed, and read together they sketch a coherent — if underdeveloped — position.
The first concerns institutional standing: the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BRPTO) appears in the Strategy's table of SNCTI stakeholders, charged with overseeing industrial property policy and management. Its inclusion in the institutional map of the innovation system, rather than treatment as a mere registry, is significant. The second concerns the interface between universities and firms. Recommendation 26 calls for strengthening NIT (Núcleos de Inovação Tecnológica) and intellectual property centres, with legal and technical support for technology transfer, and the Strategy elsewhere assigns NITs responsibility for managing innovation and IP on behalf of scientific and technological institutions (ICTs). This is the most concrete IP commitment in the document, and the one most directly relevant to university technology transfer practice under the “Marco Legal”.
Emerging technologies are treated differently again. In the AI, quantum computing and new materials priority area, the Strategy proposes creating experimental regulatory environments together with intellectual property guidelines that stimulate innovation and enable secure technology transfer. The pairing of sandboxes with IP guidance is notable, because it treats IP as part of the regulatory environment for emerging technology rather than as a downstream formality.
Outward-facing ambitions are set out in Recommendation 55, which, under international cooperation, calls for improving intellectual property agreements while prioritising technological protection and integration into global markets. The introductory chapter is more explicit about the rationale: South Korea and Japan are cited as models of innovation-based industrialisation that combined IP protection with incentives for technology exports, and access to international markets and protection of innovations against misappropriation by foreign actors are described as instruments of global competition, requiring close attention to industrial property policy in strategic sectors of social interest such as health and food. Technical standards and metrological certification are treated in the same breath, as instruments for avoiding trade barriers.
Two further passages point in a more defensive direction. Axis III's guidelines call for integrating ST&I, industry and defence with ethical and intellectual property safeguards — a phrase that will require considerable elaboration before it becomes operational. Alongside it, the Strategy endorses open science practices while framing them explicitly as a balance between transparency, reproducibility and collaboration on one side and the protection of sensitive and strategic data on the other; elsewhere it conditions the promotion of data and results sharing on safeguarding personal data and copyright, as well as the sovereignty of strategic data. The ENCTI thus adopts data sovereignty as an inseparable dimension of technological sovereignty, asserting the State's capacity to regulate, access, use and protect data generated with public resources.
Finally, two priority areas carry unstated IP consequences. Recommendation 33 calls for protecting environmental, genetic and cultural assets as the foundation of bioeconomic and territorial sovereignty; combined with the Strategy's heavy investment in the bioeconomy, the Amazon and the valorisation of traditional knowledge, this points squarely at Brazil's access and benefit-sharing regime — though the Strategy nowhere names Law 13.123/2015, the Nagoya Protocol, or the CGen. In health, the CEIS priority area targets a 40% reduction in dependence on imported APIs and equipment by 2030 and self-sufficiency in strategic medicines by 2034, and while the Strategy discusses regulatory frameworks and clinical trial environments, it is entirely silent on patent policy in pharmaceuticals.
Nevertheless, for IP researchers, the ENCTI is most productive read against what it omits. The document contains no patent targets, no discussion of the BRPTO examination backlog, no reference to patent quality and no engagement with the specific ownership and revenue-sharing rules for publicly funded research under the Marco Legal de CT&I. Recommendation 55's call to “improve intellectual property agreements” is left entirely undefined — it is not clear whether this refers to bilateral cooperation instruments, multilateral negotiation posture, or contractual practice in ICT–firm partnerships.
The ENCTI 2024–2034 is a document about state capacity. Its central claim — that there is no sovereignty without domestic knowledge generation, and no sustainable development without national innovation capacity — is asserted rather than argued, and its instruments are largely inherited rather than invented. Its distinctive contribution is the reframing of ST&I as strategic infrastructure and the explicit linkage of the science agenda to the reindustrialisation agenda through the NIB missions.
For the IP community, the Strategy is best understood as an invitation. It creates the political space within which industrial property policy, technology transfer regulation, and access-and-benefit-sharing reform will be debated over the next decade, and it does so without prescribing outcomes. The PACTI will determine whether that space is filled with substance. Until then, the task of specifying what "improving intellectual property agreements" and "intellectual property guidelines" should mean falls largely to those who study and practise in the field.
This section gives quick answers to the most common questions about this insight. What changed, why it matters, and the practical next steps. If your situation needs tailored advice, contact the RNA Law team.
Q1: What is the ENCTI 2024–2034?
A1: It is Brazil’s National Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, a ten-year planning document for ST&I policy.
Q2: Why does the article focus on intellectual property?
A2: Because the ENCTI is not an IP document, but it shapes the framework for industrial property, technology transfer and access-and-benefit-sharing reforms.
Q3: What is the main innovation challenge identified by the Strategy?
A3: The Strategy says Brazil has struggled to convert scientific capacity into business innovation and stronger private-sector R&D.
Q4: How does the ENCTI address technology transfer?
A4: It calls for strengthening NITs and intellectual property centres and for support to improve technology transfer between universities and firms.
Q5: What does the article say the ENCTI leaves undefined?
A5: It leaves undefined several IP-related issues, including patent targets, BRPTO backlog concerns, and the meaning of improving intellectual property agreements.
