Mexico Tech Transfer: IMPI's 2026 LFPPI Reform

Mexico rebuilt two pieces of the legal and institutional scaffolding behind university technology transfer within about fifteen months of each other. On January 1, 2025, the federal science ministry was reorganized from CONAHCYT into a cabinet-level secretariat, SECIHTI. Then, on April 3, 2026, a reform to the Federal Law for the Protection of Industrial Property (Ley Federal de Proteccion a la Propiedad Industrial, LFPPI) was published in the Diario Oficial de la Federacion and took effect the next day, expanding the powers of Mexico’s patent and trademark office, IMPI (Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial), including a new, explicit role in technology transfer. Together, these two changes reshape who does what in Mexico’s university-to-industry commercialization pipeline — and research administrators working with Mexican institutions, or US/international TTOs licensing to or from Mexican partners, need to understand both pieces, not just the funding-agency side.

This guide focuses specifically on the intellectual-property and technology-transfer angle: IMPI’s new statutory role, the patent-procedure changes that affect university invention disclosures, and what is (and is not yet) defined about how Mexican TTOs will operate under the reformed framework. For the funding and researcher-support side of the SECIHTI reorganization — scholarship programs, the National Researcher System, and what changed structurally when CONACYT became CONAHCYT and then SECIHTI — see CASRAI’s companion guide, SECIHTI (Formerly CONACYT, Formerly CONAHCYT): Mexico’s Restructured Science Ministry.

The two reforms, in brief

January 1, 2025 — SECIHTI (Secretaria de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnologia e Innovacion) begins operating, replacing CONAHCYT, under the Decree for the reform, addition, and enforcement of various provisions of the Organic Law of the Federal Public Administration, implementing the General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation passed by Congress in 2023.
September 15, 2025 — President Claudia Sheinbaum submits an initiative to reform the LFPPI to the Senate.
April 3-4, 2026 — the reform decree is published in the Diario Oficial de la Federacion and enters into force, amending IMPI’s statutory powers under LFPPI Articles 2 and 5, among other provisions.

From CONACYT to CONAHCYT to SECIHTI: the institutional lineage, briefly

Mexico’s national science agency has changed both its name and its legal form twice in recent years: CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia) became CONAHCYT (adding “Humanidades”) under the 2023 General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation, and then CONAHCYT itself was elevated from a decentralized council into a full cabinet secretariat, SECIHTI, effective January 1, 2025. That elevation matters for technology transfer specifically because it changes SECIHTI’s institutional standing relative to IMPI: the LFPPI reform’s Article 5 cooperation duty (below) is a secretariat-to-institute relationship, not a council-to-institute one, which is a materially different footing for interagency coordination on national innovation policy. For the researcher-facing side of that reorganization — funding lines, the SNII (formerly SNI) researcher-classification system, and scholarship continuity — see the companion guides linked above and in the “Related CASRAI guides” section below.

The 2026 LFPPI reform: what changed for technology transfer

IMPI’s expanded technology-transfer mandate

Two provisions of the reformed LFPPI are the direct source of IMPI’s new tech-transfer role:

Article 2(V) now expressly writes “the promotion and encouragement of technology transfer” into the law’s stated purpose, alongside the existing goal of disseminating technological knowledge.
Article 5 gives IMPI two new, concrete duties: it must provide legal advice on licenses, assignments, transfers of rights, and other instruments used to enter into technology-transfer agreements; and it must cooperate with SECIHTI on the development of innovation and the protection of industrial property.

In practical terms, this repositions IMPI from a registration-and-examination authority into an advisory participant in the licensing and assignment transactions that Mexican university TTOs (and companies) execute — the same category of agreement CASRAI covers generally in The Technology Transfer Process: From Invention Disclosure to Licensing and Revenue Distribution. What the reform does not yet specify, based on the primary provisions reviewed for this guide, is a defined operational mechanism for that advisory role — there is no published implementing regulation (reglamento) detailing intake procedures, timelines, or the boundary between IMPI’s new advisory function and the private legal counsel a TTO would normally retain for a license negotiation. Institutions should treat this as a statutory mandate whose administrative rollout is still forming, not as a fully operational service, until IMPI or SECIHTI publish implementing rules.

Provisional patent applications arrive in Mexico

The reform introduces provisional patent applications to Mexican practice for the first time, modeled on the long-standing US mechanism (see CASRAI’s Provisional Patent Applications: USPTO Requirements, Cost, and the 12-Month Deadline for how the US version works). Under the reformed LFPPI, an applicant can secure a filing date with a provisional filing and must convert it to a final, complete application within 12 months — the same conversion window as the US system, which matters for any Mexican university TTO coordinating parallel filings with a US or PCT strategy after an invention disclosure.

Faster decisions, reinstatement, and priority restoration

A one-year deadline is established for IMPI to grant or deny a patent, utility model, or industrial design application, running from the start of substantive examination — a significant procedural commitment given examination backlogs have historically been a criticism of the office.
Applicants who miss a filing deadline can request reinstatement within 15 days of the missed date.
Convention (Paris Convention) priority rights that lapse can be restored within two months of their expiration.
A Specialized Technical Committee is established within IMPI specifically to monitor examination delays and enforce timelier decisions.

For TTOs, the one-year examination deadline and the reinstatement/restoration windows are the most operationally relevant of these changes: they shorten the planning horizon for licensing decisions that were previously contingent on an open-ended Mexican prosecution timeline, and they reduce (though do not eliminate) the risk of losing rights to an administrative missed deadline.

Other 2026 reform provisions (context, not the focus of this guide)

The same decree also touches trademark law and enforcement mechanics that are not specific to technology transfer but are worth knowing exist in the same reform package: new trademark categories (positional, motion, and multimedia marks), a bar on registering signs identical to indigenous or Afro-Mexican cultural heritage elements, sanctions for AI-assisted infringement, “ambush marketing” designated as an administrative infringement, electronic filing for infringement proceedings, and a regulatory-delay patent-term compensation mechanism for health-sector registrations (capped at five years) tied to Mexico’s USMCA obligations.

What this means for Mexican university TTOs, practically

Read together, the two reforms point toward tighter, more formal coordination between the technology-transfer/licensing side of a Mexican research institution and two federal bodies that previously operated on largely separate tracks: SECIHTI (funding, research policy, researcher classification) and IMPI (patent/trademark examination, now also technology-transfer advisory). A few practical implications for institutions and their counterparts:

Filing strategy: the new 12-month provisional-to-final conversion window gives Mexican institutions a filing tool that maps directly onto the US provisional-patent workflow many university TTOs already run in parallel for cross-border inventions — disclosure timing relative to a Mexican provisional filing should now be planned the same way it is for a US one.
Examination timeline: the one-year decision deadline is new enough (in force since April 2026) that there is no track record yet of IMPI actually meeting it in practice; institutions relying on it for licensing-deal timing should treat it as a statutory target, not a guaranteed outcome, until more prosecution history accumulates.
IMPI’s advisory role: until implementing regulations define how IMPI’s Article 5 advisory duty on license/assignment instruments actually operates, institutions should continue to route license and technology-transfer agreement drafting through qualified Mexican IP counsel, and treat IMPI’s new advisory duty as a developing, not yet substitutable, resource.
Cross-border comparison: institutions benchmarking Mexico’s reform against the US model should note that IMPI’s expanded role is an advisory/coordination mandate, not a march-in or funding-conditioned rights regime — it is structurally closer to a patent office taking on a facilitation function than to the US Bayh-Dole Act’s government-rights framework. See CASRAI’s Bayh-Dole March-In Rights: What They Mean for University Tech Transfer for that US comparison point.

What is still unconfirmed or unspecified

Based on the primary reform text and legal-analysis commentary reviewed for this guide, the following are not yet defined and should not be assumed:

No implementing regulation (reglamento) had been published detailing IMPI’s operational procedure for its new technology-transfer advisory duty as of this writing.
The reform text does not specify a dedicated mechanism, office, or formal process for university-to-industry technology transfer specifically (as distinct from IMPI’s general advisory duty on licensing instruments for any applicant, academic or commercial).
No public data yet exists on IMPI’s actual performance against the new one-year examination deadline, since the provision only took effect in April 2026.

Institutions and administrators should treat this guide as a snapshot of the statutory framework as of mid-2026 and verify current implementation status directly with IMPI (impi.gob.mx) or SECIHTI (secihti.mx) before relying on specific procedural details for an active filing or licensing matter.

Frequently asked questions

Is IMPI now Mexico’s technology transfer office?

No. IMPI remains Mexico’s national patent, trademark, and industrial-design office. The 2026 LFPPI reform adds a statutory advisory duty on technology-transfer instruments (licenses, assignments) and a cooperation duty with SECIHTI — it does not convert IMPI into a technology transfer office in the sense CASRAI uses the term elsewhere (see The Technology Transfer Process): individual Mexican universities and research institutions still operate their own TTOs or equivalent offices for invention disclosure intake, patentability assessment, and licensing negotiation.

Does the reform change who owns inventions made at Mexican public universities?

The LFPPI reform reviewed here is about patent procedure and IMPI’s institutional powers, not about ownership/assignment defaults for university-employee inventions, which are governed separately by Mexican labor law, the Ley Federal del Trabajo’s industrial-property provisions, and each institution’s own IP policy. Nothing in the sources reviewed for this guide indicates the 2026 reform changed those ownership defaults.

How does Mexico’s provisional patent application compare to the US version?

Structurally similar: both secure an early filing date and require conversion to a complete application within 12 months. See CASRAI’s Provisional Patent Applications: USPTO Requirements, Cost, and the 12-Month Deadline for the US mechanics; Mexican-specific fee schedules, formal requirements, and IMPI examination practice under the new provision should be confirmed directly with IMPI or Mexican patent counsel, since practice notes are still developing this soon after the April 2026 effective date.

What replaced CONAHCYT, and when?

SECIHTI (Secretaria de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnologia e Innovacion), effective January 1, 2025. See CASRAI’s SECIHTI guide for the full funding and researcher-classification detail; this guide covers only the technology-transfer/IP intersection with that reorganization.

Related CASRAI guides

Sources

Diario Oficial de la Federacion, decree amending the Ley Federal de Proteccion a la Propiedad Industrial, published April 3, 2026 (in force April 4, 2026)
Basham, Ringe y Correa, “Mexico: Amendment to the Federal Law for the Protection of Industrial Property – Key Changes and Practical Implications,” 2026
Mijares Angoitia Cortes y Fuentes, “Reforma a la Ley Federal de Proteccion a la Propiedad Industrial: Transferencia de Tecnologia y Simplificacion del Proceso de Proteccion de Patentes y Registros,” 2026
Decree for the reform, addition and enforcement of various provisions of the Organic Law of the Federal Public Administration (SECIHTI creation), effective January 1, 2025; General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation, 2023