Universities, Patents and Intellectual Property: do they match?

The Director of the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) reports that the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in Mexico City, is the Higher Education establishment that has filed the most patent applications during the period 2013-2018 (278 of them). Therefore, this month IMPI and UNAM signed a collaboration agreement on industrial property.
According to IMPI’s director, IMPI and UNAM share the same ‘commitment to support and promote entrepreneurship and the creation of innovation, as well as the promotion of the predominant role of industrial property, endorsing the protection and commercialization of intangibles.’

In the same line, IMPI notes that since 2012 has increased the Patent Centres (CePats) from 21 to 104. These centres, linked to IMPI, are entities that rise in the research and higher education institutions. They provide consultancies, updates, training in the field of technological information searches, patents, industrial designs, utility models and everything related to the protection of industrial property.

An interesting fact published by IMPI is the data regarding the number of patent applications filed by national Higher Education institutions which, added together, are 1,205 patent applications:

UNAM, 'the people to the university, the university to the people'
 by David Alfaro Siqueiros 

• The UNAM, 278;
• the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), 222;
• the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 164;
• the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 140;
• the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM), 89;
• the Secretaria de Educacion Publica-Technological National Education of Mexico, 81;
• the Universidad de Guanajuato, 66;
• the Universidad de Sonora, 64;
• the Universidad Autonoma de Querétaro, 56; and
• the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, 45.

Looking at this cooperation we can finally say that the academia and IP are counterparts, working together towards promoting innovation.