Provisional patent in Chile: Procedure, advantages, and incentives to innovateThe production of knowledge and information results in the improvement of living standards. Economic development has determined that theproducers of this knowledge must be adequately rewarded for their inventions, considering that innovation and the solution for problems that affect people’s productivity and quality of life must be protected. These rewards include property rights granted by an invention patent. However, in the invention process, there is a time when the inventor needs testing or experimenting for his innovation, and it will become public without the protection of a final patent application. In this situation and to protect the creative process, it is functional to introduce a type of provisional patent. It will last for a while until the request for a nonprovisional patent. This article analyzes the provisional patent and its re-introduction into the Chilean law of intellectual property from a comparative and historical perspective. The production of knowledge and information results in the improvement of living standards. Economic development has determined that the producers of this knowledge must be adequately rewarded for their inventions, considering that innovation and the solution of problems that affect people's productivity and quality of life must be protected. These rewards include property rights granted by an invention patent. However, there is a time when the inventor is in the need of testing or making experiments for his innovation, therefore his investigation will become public and still cannot file a final patent application. For this situation, and to protect the creative process, a type of provisional patent is considered useful, which will last for a while until the request for a nonprovisional patent. This article analyzes the provisional patent and its re-introduction into the Chilean system of intellectual property rights, from a comparative and historical perspective.