The 2026 Australian Intellectual Property Report is out now. The 14th in the series, it lands at a moment when productivity, competitiveness and economic resilience are front of mind. At the same time, very few of the assumptions that shaped the international economy over the past three decades can be taken for granted. Strategic competition, trade policy and technological change are reshaping who uses Australia’s IP system. They are also influencing where firms invest, with whom they collaborate and how they protect what they create.

This article draws together findings from the report, under four themes:

• – geostrategic shifts and the IP system
• – new evidence on how IP drives firm-level productivity, scale and resilience
• – the strength of domestic engagement and outlook
• – what new research tells us about how Australian patent standards have influenced global innovation, and the limits of that influence.

A system being reshaped by geostrategic and geoeconomic forces

Beneath aggregate filing numbers, the composition of demand for IP rights in Australia has shifted in a number of important ways. First, cross-border patent collaboration declined materially last year. The number of standard complete applications involving applicants from more than one country fell by close to 15% in 2025, even as total filings barely moved. The decline was heavily concentrated in filings involving applicants from the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Australia-linked collaboration proved comparatively resilient: the number of foreign-origin applications including at least one Australian applicant edged up. The pattern is consistent with broader evidence of fragmentation in global science and innovation networks, and with a re-weighting of where firms see value in joint R&D.

In trade marks, the story is one of diversification rather than contraction. Australia received trade mark applications from a record 138 overseas locations in 2025, the most in over a decade. Total filings hit a new high of 97,345, up more than 13% on the previous year. Growth came from many directions, with strong relative increases from a wide range of economies including Türkiye, Singapore, Ireland and India. Filings from China also continued to grow, though at a moderating pace relative to recent years. The pattern is consistent with diversification in trade relationships as economies seek to reroute around frictions, and with the growing role of ecommerce platforms in mediating market access.

Underlying these patterns is a structural shift in how brand owners reach Australian consumers. As ecommerce ecosystems have developed, trade marks have become an increasingly important means of accessing markets mediated by digital platforms. Many platforms now require sellers to hold registered marks before they can sell branded goods. That dynamic is visible across multiple origins. It has been particularly evident in growth from China, where manufacturers have shifted progressively from contract production for foreign brand owners towards commercialising their own brands in destination markets. Comparable patterns of more direct brand-building, with less contract-manufacturing engagement, are worth tracking from other economies, particularly if trade tensions persist.

For Australian practice, these shifts may open up new dimensions of client strategy. Where brand-building activity is increasingly platform-mediated, the timing and breadth of trade mark protection may take on new commercial significance. Clients entering related classes may increasingly need to think about the register as a more crowded and faster-moving landscape, and about how best to coordinate IP approach with broader ecommerce and platform-enforcement strategies. How the changing commerce and trade environment is impacting the trade mark registry and use of trade marks will be an important focus for research going forward.

IP, productivity and resilience: new evidence from Australian firms

The substantive economic case for IP has rarely been more relevant. The Australian Government has placed productivity, competitiveness and economic resilience at the centre of its agenda, and IP sits squarely in that frame. This year’s report introduces new firm-level research, drawing on linked administrative data from IP Australia’s Intellectual Property Longitudinal Research Database and the Australian Bureau of Statistics Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment. The dataset covers close to the full population of active firms in Australia between 2014 and 2023, and allows the analysis to track what happens before and after a firm’s first patent or trade mark grant.

The research uses an event study design that compares each firm receiving its first grant with a peer group matched on age, size, R&D intensity, financial performance and leverage. These are firm-level associations, not pure causal effects. Firms expecting growth have stronger incentives to invest in IP, so some selection is in the data. But the design strengthens confidence that what is observed after grant reflects more than the continuation of earlier trends.

The study provides the most granular evidence available to date on the firm-level economic outcomes linked to patenting in Australia. For Australian firms, after their first patent grant, total factor productivity rises by an estimated 15% on average, compared to similar firms that were on comparable growth paths. After grant, Australian firms experience on average 43% more in total income than their matched peers, with effects building from around 10% in the first post-grant year to approximately 68% in later years. These patterns are consistent with deeper improvements in production efficiency and technical capability, rather than scaling alone. The results are consistent with patent grants serving as an important precursor to commercialisation or the internal implementation of innovations that drive productivity improvements.

Trade marks operate through a different channel. After a first trade mark registration, Australian firms earn approximately 78% more income than their peers. Labour productivity is 16% higher. Total factor productivity moves only modestly. The pattern points to scaling and market penetration: trade marks help firms expand revenue and reach by building brand recognition and consumer trust, with labour productivity gains following as the firm grows. Effects build over 6 years and then begin to moderate, consistent with market saturation or the working out of an initial competitive advantage.

These results give empirical weight to the often posed proposition that IP is part of how good firms get better, and how growing firms become more productive. They also point to something more nuanced than a blanket endorsement of filing. The effects are concentrated in IP-intensive sectors. For patents, this includes manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, professional, scientific and technical services. For trade marks the impact on labour productivity is seen in retail, transport and warehousing, and finance sectors. The channels by which IP impacts firm performance also varies significantly across sectors. The impacts emerge most strongly at pivotal moments in a firm’s development. Good advice on when and what to file matters.

Australian businesses are leaning in

If the geostrategic story is one of fragmentation, the domestic story suggests resilience on the part of Australian innovators. Resident engagement set new records on several measures and strengthened slightly across the IP rights system overall in 2025. Trade mark applications by Australian residents grew by just over 15% to a record 55,913. Resident filings now make up 57% of total applications, the highest share since 2021. Growth was broad-based, but particularly strong in service classes, which had been soft for several years: financial services up 25%, construction up 24%, scientific and technological services (which includes a substantial AI component) up 23%, advertising and business services up 22%. The pattern aligns with broader trends in household spending, where growth has been concentrated in services.

Design filings hit a record 10,296, up 7%. Australian resident design filings reached 3,078, the highest level on record, with sustained engagement in furniture, construction elements, tools and hardware. Australian resident patent filings increased by 9% to 2,810, lifting the resident share to its highest level since 2021. The pattern across patents has been a more targeted one. Where headline numbers were stable, residents were the source of growth, consistent with international evidence that under uncertainty, firms tend to concentrate patenting on higher-value inventions rather than withdraw uniformly.

One development worth highlighting is provisional patent filings. Provisional applications rose from 4,343 in 2024 to 6,867 in 2025, an increase of just over 58%. The ratio of standard complete applications to provisionals has nearly halved in a year. Two compositional shifts sit behind this. The share of provisional applicants without representation rose from around 37% at the end of 2024 to 52% in 2025. At the same time, the share who are new filers — having never filed a patent before — jumped from around 42% over 2021-2024, to 63% per cent in 2025.

These trends are consistent with new filers experimenting with AI and digital tools in drafting, seeking low-cost entry points into patenting. For new filers, there can be a substantial gap between a provisional that establishes useful priority and one that does not. For self-represented filers, that gap may only become apparent during examination of a later complete application. The trend points to an arguably more important advisory role for the profession at the earliest stages of an inventor’s engagement with the system. This is where mistakes are most costly, and the value of professional judgement is highest. Patent offices internationally are watching this pattern closely as AI-assisted tools develop. The partnership between the offices and the profession will play a key role.

Patent scope, complexity and the limits of unilateral reform

One of the more striking pieces of research in this year’s report concerns the international effects of Australia’s 2013 Raising the Bar reforms. The study was led by researchers at Motu in New Zealand and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, working with data on patent citations across multiple jurisdictions. The question they asked was straightforward but, until now, unanswered with this level of rigour. When a mid-sized patent office narrows the scope of protection available within its borders, does that affect later innovation only domestically, or does it influence technological trajectories beyond its borders as well?

Most Australian patents are part of international families. When Australian examiners apply tighter patentability and disclosure standards, that affects what is in the prior art landscape globally. The researchers were able to match Australian patents granted under post-reform standards with their counterparts at the European Patent Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and trace how each family was cited in subsequent filings around the world.

The headline finding is that the reforms had a moderate but discernible effect on follow-on innovation outside Australia. More, later patents cited earlier inventions where Australian scope had been narrowed. The effect operates primarily through narrative or “in-text” citations, suggesting that narrower scope leaves more room for subsequent inventors to build on earlier work and reduces the risk of being blocked. Domestic patent policy, in other words, is not a purely domestic instrument.

The second finding warrants careful attention. The effects are not uniform across technology fields. In less complex, more modular technologies – pharmaceuticals and chemicals are the standard examples – narrower scope is associated with more cumulative innovation. In highly complex, interdependent fields – telecommunications, semiconductors, advanced computing – narrower scope had little measurable effect.

Simply giving inventors more room is not enough, in instances where innovation depends on many components working together, where progress requires coordination across firms, or where patents overlap in thickets and bottlenecks are resolved through licensing, standards and collaboration. The constraints on follow-on innovation are not principally about scope.

Two implications follow for the profession’s perspective on Australian policy. The first is that in patent policy and drafting, settings that work well in one technology may not suit another. There is no single calibration that is universally optimal. The implication is not that policy makers and the innovation system should preference particular technologies in designing policy. Instead, policy choices can impact technologies and sectors differently, in ways that influence the welfare generated by the IP system.

The second is that, in complex technologies, alignment with trusted international partners matters. No single jurisdiction determines outcomes where innovation depends on standards, cross-licensing and global coordination. IP Australia’s new two-year pilot recognising the European Patent Office as an International Searching and Preliminary Examining Authority, and our new mutual recognition arrangement with the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, are examples of the cooperation architecture that this evidence supports. Both arrangements give applicants more options, increased access to high-quality search and examination, and the potential to reduce duplication and cost across multi-jurisdictional protection strategies.

What it adds up to

Taken together with earlier research, the 2026 report tells a story about an IP system functioning as core economic infrastructure during a period of structural adjustment. The new firm-level evidence shows that engagement with the system is associated with sustained, economically meaningful improvements in income and productivity at pivotal moments in a firm’s development. The geostrategic data show that the system is absorbing real shifts in how firms collaborate, where they file, and how they reach end markets. Domestic engagement has been at or near record highs across most of the IP rights. The new evidence on patent scope points to both the influence of Australian settings beyond Australia’s borders and the limits of unilateral action in complex technology fields.

The geostrategic reordering is not a temporary shift. Diversification in trade mark filings, sustained shifts in patent collaboration patterns, and the rise of platform-mediated commerce are features of a system that is changing shape. Practice that adjusts – how clients build international portfolios, how they think about enforcement in ecommerce contexts, how they engage with cooperation arrangements that reduce duplication – is practice that is well placed.  The evidence increasingly supports a view of the IP system as something more than a domestic legal instrument. IP is part of the economic infrastructure that supports productivity, scale and resilience for Australian firms. It forms part of the connective tissue that links Australia into global value chains in critical minerals, battery circularity, AI applications and other sectors that matter for the country’s competitive and strategic position over the decade ahead.

The 2026 Australian IP Report, together with IP Australia’s open data tools – IP Rights Overview and IP RAPID – and the Office of the Chief Economist’s research paper series, is available through the IP Australia website, www.ipaustralia.gov.au. Members of the IPTA community are warmly encouraged to engage with the underlying evidence base, and we welcome ongoing feedback and conversation.