Vietnam rewrote the legal foundation of its national innovation system in a single legislative cycle in 2025. Three interlocking laws — the Law on Science, Technology and Innovation, an amended Intellectual Property Law, and an amended Law on Technology Transfer — together move the default ownership position for state-funded research results away from the state as ultimate rights-holder and toward the university, institute, or other implementing organization that actually performed the work. For research administrators and technology transfer offices working with Vietnamese partner institutions, or advising researchers on collaborations that touch Vietnamese state science and technology (S&T) funding, this is a structural change in who can file for protection, who can license or commercialize a result, and who captures the resulting benefit.
The three laws driving the reform
Vietnam’s National Assembly adopted ten science- and technology-related laws in 2025. Three of them are directly relevant to university IP ownership and tech-transfer rights:
| Law | Adopted | Effective | Relevance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law on Science, Technology and Innovation (Law No. 93/2025/QH15) | June 27, 2025 | October 1, 2025 (a small number of provisions from July 1, 2025) | Repeals the prior IP-ownership provisions for state-funded S&T results and re-houses them; grants implementing organizations the right to apply for patent/industrial-design protection and to organize commercialization |
| Amended Intellectual Property Law (Law No. 131/2025/QH15) | December 10, 2025 | April 1, 2026 | Recognizes IP as a bankable economic asset — valuable, transferable, and usable as collateral — and removes the state-funded-research ownership provisions superseded by the STI Law |
| Amended Law on Technology Transfer | December 10, 2025 | April 1, 2026 | Adds incentive tiers for technology application, mastery, and R&D activity, and encourages organizations to contribute technologies developed through their own research |
The first of these, the Law on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI Law), is the load-bearing statute for the ownership question. It is also the first Vietnamese law to place “innovation” on statutory equal footing with “science” and “technology” — previously the operative framework was simply the 2013 Law on Science and Technology, which the new law replaces outright.
The pre-reform position: the state as default rights-holder
Under Vietnam’s prior framework, results generated through state-budget-funded S&T tasks sat closer to the state than to the performing institution. The 2022 amendments to the (then-standing) Law on Intellectual Property had already begun narrowing that gap in places — notably Article 139.6, which allowed transfer of rights in state-funded IP but restricted the transferee to Vietnamese organizations or Vietnamese resident citizens, with the transferee assuming the obligations the host organization previously carried. Even so, the operative logic remained one of state interest protected first, institutional autonomy exercised within limits set by “applicable science and technology laws” — a phrase that in practice meant a research institute or university needed government sign-off at multiple points before it could patent, license, or otherwise commercialize a state-funded result on its own initiative.
What the STI Law actually changes
Article 71.7 of the STI Law repeals the prior IP-ownership provisions that applied to state-funded S&T tasks, relocating and rewriting the underlying rule. Under the new framework, for research financed by the state budget, the implementing organization — in practice, the university, public research institute, or other performing entity, not the funding ministry — holds the right to:
- apply for patent and industrial design protection over the results in its own name;
- organize and pursue commercialization activity (licensing, spin-out formation, technology transfer agreements) without needing to route each transaction back through the state as rights-holder; and
- distribute the resulting benefits, in accordance with applicable science, technology, and innovation regulations.
This is the mechanism behind the “state control to institutional ownership” framing: ownership and the authority to act on it move to the entity that generated the result, rather than remaining vested in — or requiring case-by-case release from — the state. The STI Law pairs this with other reforms aimed at the same commercialization goal: flexible lump-sum funding mechanisms for research projects (moving away from item-by-item budget approval), and liability exemptions for researchers and institutions when a good-faith, appropriately assessed risk does not pan out — addressing a long-standing complaint that fear of after-the-fact liability discouraged ambitious, commercially-oriented research in the first place.
The amended IP Law: IP as a bankable asset
The amended Intellectual Property Law (Law No. 131/2025/QH15), passed the same December 2025 session and effective April 1, 2026, works alongside the STI Law rather than duplicating it. Where the STI Law settles who owns state-funded results and can act on that ownership, the amended IP Law reframes what IP itself can be used for: it explicitly recognizes IP rights as an economic asset that can be valued, transferred, pledged as loan collateral, and recorded for financial and investment purposes. Combined with the ownership shift in the STI Law, the practical effect is that a Vietnamese university holding title to a state-funded invention is no longer just a custodian with a use-right — it holds an asset it can license, capitalize, or use to attract co-investment in a spinout, in terms comparable to how a Bayh-Dole-governed U.S. university treats an invention it has elected to retain title to. The amended Law on Technology Transfer, effective the same date, adds incentive tiers that reward organizations for contributing research-derived technologies into the commercialization pipeline, reinforcing the same direction.
Effective-date and transition timeline
Institutions working with Vietnamese partners should track two dates, not one:
- October 1, 2025 — the STI Law takes effect and the prior state-funded IP-ownership rule is repealed. This is the operative date for the ownership shift itself.
- April 1, 2026 — the amended IP Law and amended Technology Transfer Law take effect, filling in the asset-treatment and commercialization-incentive layer around the ownership rule the STI Law already established.
Because the STI Law’s repeal of the old IP provisions (Article 71.7) predates the amended IP Law’s effective date by six months, there is a transition window in which the new ownership rule is already operative but the fuller IP-as-asset and technology-transfer incentive framework has not yet come into force. Institutions and counsel handling agreements signed in that window should confirm which provisions were carried forward by implementing decrees, since Vietnam typically issues detailed implementing guidance (nghị định/decree-level regulations) after a framework law’s passage — decree-level detail on royalty distribution formulas, valuation methodology, and disclosure procedures was not yet fully settled in public commentary at the time of writing.
What this means for university tech-transfer offices and international partners
- Due diligence on Vietnamese co-invented IP. For any collaboration involving a Vietnamese public university or state research institute, confirm which law governs the specific project’s funding period — work performed and disclosed before October 1, 2025 may still be subject to the prior state-interest rules, while later work falls under the implementing-organization ownership model.
- Licensing and equity structuring. The IP-as-asset recognition in the amended IP Law is directly relevant to any deal structure that involves using Vietnamese-originated IP as consideration for equity or as loan collateral for a spinout — a use that was harder to support cleanly under the prior framework.
- Benefit-sharing terms. The STI Law defers the mechanics of benefit distribution to “applicable science, technology, and innovation laws” rather than fixing a formula in the statute itself — expect institution-level or decree-level policies to matter as much as the framework law when negotiating inventor and institutional shares.
- Cross-border technology transfer restrictions. The pre-existing restriction on transferring rights in state-funded IP only to Vietnamese organizations or resident citizens (originally Article 139.6 of the 2022 IP Law amendments) reflects a broader caution around outbound transfer of state-funded results that international partners should not assume has disappeared simply because ownership itself has shifted toward the institution — confirm current outbound-transfer rules with Vietnamese counsel for any specific deal rather than assuming full parity with a Bayh-Dole-style regime.
How this compares to other national reform paths
Vietnam is not alone in moving university IP ownership away from the state and toward the performing institution — it is one of several jurisdictions to have made a comparable move in recent years, each with its own mechanism and timeline. CASRAI’s guides to China’s 2015 Technology Transfer Law and India’s Technology Transfer Framework cover two other Asian examples of this same institutional-ownership shift, each moving on its own statutory track. In Europe, several countries have instead reformed the opposite starting point — abolishing “professor’s privilege,” the historical rule under which the individual academic inventor (not the university or the state) held title — as covered in CASRAI’s guides to Italy’s 2023 IP Code Reform, Sweden’s professor’s-privilege model, and Denmark, Finland, and Norway’s abolition of the professor’s privilege. Brazil’s Marco Legal da Inovação reform followed a third path, building a statutory framework around dedicated Núcleos de Inovação Tecnológica (NITs) at each institution. Vietnam’s reform is closer in spirit to the China and India examples than to the European professor’s-privilege reversals: in all three Asian cases, the starting point was state or state-agency ownership, and the reform vests title in the implementing institution rather than in the individual researcher.
Frequently asked questions
Does Vietnam’s reform give ownership to individual researchers, or to their institution?
To the institution. The STI Law vests the right to apply for protection, commercialize, and distribute benefits in the “implementing organization” — the university or institute that performed the state-funded work — not in the individual researcher directly. This distinguishes Vietnam’s reform from the “professor’s privilege” reversals seen in parts of Europe, where the starting point was individual ownership and the reform moved rights toward the institution instead of away from the state.
Does this apply to all research in Vietnam, or only state-funded projects?
The ownership provisions discussed here apply specifically to results from state-budget-funded science and technology tasks. Privately funded research and foreign-funded collaborations outside the state S&T task framework are generally governed by ordinary contractual IP terms and the general provisions of the IP Law, not the state-funded-task rules the STI Law rewrites.
When exactly did the ownership rule change take effect?
The Law on Science, Technology and Innovation (Law No. 93/2025/QH15), which repeals the prior state-funded IP-ownership provisions and establishes implementing-organization ownership, took effect October 1, 2025. The amended Intellectual Property Law and amended Law on Technology Transfer, which build out the surrounding asset-treatment and commercialization-incentive framework, take effect April 1, 2026.
Can a Vietnamese university now freely transfer state-funded IP to a foreign company?
Not necessarily without restriction. A prior rule (Article 139.6 of the 2022 IP Law amendments) limited transfer of rights in state-funded IP to Vietnamese organizations or Vietnamese resident citizens. Institutions and partners should confirm the current cross-border transfer rules with Vietnamese counsel for any specific transaction rather than assuming the ownership shift alone removed outbound-transfer restrictions.
Is there implementing guidance (decrees) that spells out the details?
Vietnam typically follows a framework law of this kind with decree-level implementing regulations (nghị định) that fill in mechanics such as valuation methodology, benefit-distribution formulas, and disclosure procedures. At the time of writing, public legal commentary on the STI Law and the amended IP Law had not yet settled all of that decree-level detail — institutions should confirm current implementing regulations directly before relying on specific procedural mechanics.
This guide reflects publicly available legal commentary and primary legislative summaries current as of mid-2026. Vietnamese decree-level implementing regulations continue to be issued; confirm current requirements with Vietnamese legal counsel before relying on specific procedural details for an active transaction.
