Admittedly, it takes a particular kind of enthusiast to spend an entire morning glued to the screen following a live broadcast from Congress. It doesn’t exactly sound like the most entertaining plan in the world, but a week ago many of us who work in the innovation ecosystem put our schedules on hold to watch the legislative tally move forward. For the average citizen, it was just another bureaucratic formality; for technology managers like us, who live in the trenches of applied science, that vote was crucial.
At long last, the much-discussed Technology Transfer Law in Chile was approved. However, to understand its true impact, the first thing we need to do is take a closer look at its content and adjust our expectations: this is not an all-encompassing piece of legislation or a monumental code that aims to regulate the entire phenomenon of technology transfer. And it’s a good thing it isn’t. What we are celebrating today is, in fact, the triumph of strategy and pragmatism over abstract bureaucracy.
The history of this law goes back more than a decade, and it has had the backing of at least three different governments. It was born from the ground up, pushed by technology managers and professionals who, day after day, tried to connect science with the productive sector and ran, among other things, into an iron wall of legal obstacles.
It was originally conceived as a major framework law; however, during Sebastián Piñera’s second administration, as the new Ministry of Science was being set up, a key political decision was made: rather than getting bogged down in designing a perfect piece of legislation that would take years to see the light of day, the choice was to perform precision surgery on very specific critical bottlenecks, amending existing laws to open up paths that had been closed. This decision was upheld under Gabriel Boric’s government and finally came to fruition under José Antonio Kast.
The most critical bottleneck of all, and in my view the most important advance of this law, addresses an endemic problem of local innovation: the gap between the results produced by academia (science and, sometimes, technology) and what the vast majority of local industry is looking for (finished products and services). The research coming out of our universities and research centers is usually at an early stage; it lacks the standards and maturity that industry requires in order to buy or implement it. In that void, neither academia (whose focus is research) nor traditional companies (which avoid extreme risks) are willing to invest.
The best tool for crossing this no man’s land is science- and technology-based companies (EBCTs), and in particular spin-offs: a startup that takes the university’s technology through a license and takes on the mission of turning it into a product or service, assuming all the risks that entails. Anywhere in the world, it is only natural for the very researchers who invented the technology to be the founders and top executives of these companies (at least in their early stage).
In the Chilean public ecosystem, however, this was a legal pipe dream. Mainly because of administrative probity rules designed for other contexts, if the contract between a public university and the new spin-off exceeded 200 UTM, researchers could not own more than 10% of their own company. It was an absurd distortion: scientists were asked to become entrepreneurs and take on all the risks, yet the law prohibited them from being the majority shareholders of their own creation.
Not only was this a total disincentive, it also caused problems with venture capital funds, which found it strange (to put it kindly) that the people who developed the technology on which the EBCT was founded did not hold a majority stake, something that could easily be interpreted as a lack of commitment.
The new law does precisely this: it creates a surgical exception to these probity rules. Today, researchers at public universities and research centers can finally become entrepreneurs, lead their startups and transfer their own technology without artificial constraints.
Of course, there are still challenges ahead and other bottlenecks that time will force us to untangle. But the great merit of this law is that it listened to the people on the ground. The goal was not the ideal law, but a useful one. And by removing the 10% bottleneck, Chile is taking a major step toward giving science greater opportunities to have a real impact on our productive base. At the end of the day, that morning in front of the screen following a seemingly dry legislative session, what we were really watching was the doors finally opening to science- and technology-based entrepreneurship.
Read the original column at https://opinion.cooperativa.cl/opinion/ciencia-y-tecnologia/ley-de-transferencia-tecnologica-cuando-la-ciencia-genera-valor-para-la/2026-06-17/062704.html
