The National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) released its four-year strategic plan (2023-2026) with the mission of maintaining and consolidating the advances achieved in recent years and becoming a world-class office. In addition to the plan containing the autarchy’s desire to prepare and approve new official fees, nine goals were defined that cover a wide spectrum of transformations with the challenge of modernizing and gaining scale to operate at a high level.
These are the INPI’s goals for the next 4 years:
1. Optimize quality and agility in granting and registering industrial property rights, achieving performance standards of international reference;
2. Promote culture and the strategic use of industrial property for competitiveness, innovation and development in Brazil;
3. Consolidate the insertion of Brazil as a protagonist in the international industrial property system;
4. Raise knowledge and recognition of the INPI’s value to society;
5. Deepen the digital transformation with a focus on improving performance and customer service;
6. Ensure sustainable financing for modernization and expansion of service delivery capacity;
7. Ensure the growth and retention of its workforce to meet a growing demand and sustain high performance in the provision of services;
8. Provide cost-effective, efficient and sustainable logistics and infrastructure support; and
9. Improve governance and management practices, and institutional relationships.
In accordance with the 9 objectives pointed above, the INPI aims at reducing the decision time for technical examination of patent applications (counted from the filing date) from the current 6.9 years to 2 years (in 2026); reducing the decision time for the technical examination of unopposed trademark registration applications (counted from the filing of the application for the 1st examination) from the current 10 months to one month (in 2026); and reduce the decision time for administrative proceedings for nullity of trademarks from the current 42 to 15 months.
Each strategic objective has detailed projects that seek to materialize the implementation of established guidelines and priorities. A few points stand out.
Seeking to optimize the quality and agility in the granting of patent registrations, the INPI intends to automate part of the patent prosecution procedure, including with Artificial Intelligence tools. In addition, the Office wants to implement third party searches, by collaborating with other agents in society, such as universities. The autarchy still plans to update INPI’s normative acts and the criteria for granting the priority procedure, including Global-PPH.
With regard to trademark applications, in addition to studying changes to the IP Law, the INPI intends to study the elimination of the official search during the technical examination of trademarks, so that only absolute prohibitions are examined ex officio and relative prohibitions (prior registrations) are considered only upon opposition by third parties. Opposition procedures are also going to be simplified. The autarchy still intends to implement procedures for recognizing “secondary meaning”” of marks and for registering non-traditional marks.
On the international agenda, INPI will prioritize Brazil’s participation in world IP agreements and treaties, with initial emphasis on operationalizing the Hague Agreement for industrial design registration. The strategic agenda also includes incentives for regional integration in IP with a focus on Mercosur countries and the preparation of studies for the eventual adherence of Brazil to the Lisbon Agreement, for the registration of geographical indications abroad.
Many goals are still under construction and you can read the document (in Portuguese) in full here.
