A new technology hits a point where the question stops being whether it works and becomes who already owns the ground around it. Quantum computing has recently crossed that line. McKinsey’s 2026 Quantum Technology Monitor reports over 300 companies — Airbus, JPMorgan Chase, Boehringer Ingelheim among them — moving from pilots to embedded applications, against a market that could create up to $2.7 trillion in value by 2035 (read the report here).

The strategic signal for IP-intensive businesses isn’t the headline number. It’s buried in a quieter line: first movers can “secure intellectual property to build defensible ownership of key quantum computing applications.” Patent filings in quantum are already concentrating among a handful of well-capitalised leaders. In an emerging technology, the window to protect an invention closes from the outside in — every month you wait, more of the foundational landscape is claimed by someone else, and your eventual freedom to operate narrows whether or not you ever filed a thing.

Here’s the discipline the report rewards, and it’s the same pattern across every hot technology, not just quantum. The advantage doesn’t come from owning the technology — most players will eventually access it through cloud and quantum-as-a-service platforms anyway. It comes from a deliberate patent strategy: identifying the few use cases where your proprietary data, workflows, and applications create something competitors can’t easily replicate, and securing that first-mover advantage before valuations and the patent thicket make entry expensive. So the practical moves are unglamorous but decisive — map your exposure (including Q-Day cryptographic risk if you’re in financial services), pick the two or three hybrid use cases where IP could compound, get ownership and inventorship right from the first filing, and decide consciously where a patent beats a trade secret in a field that may be easy to design around. The mistake to avoid is treating quantum as a breakthrough to wait for rather than a capability — and an IP position — to build now. The companies that move will shape the standards; the rest will license them.

For more on why disciplined IP strategy beats the technology itself as a source of durable advantage, see AI Isn’t Your Advantage—Your IP Strategy Is (same lesson, applied to AI: in a hot emerging technology the moat is your protected assets, not the tech). On the principle that the decisive IP advantage is built years before it’s needed, see Built Before the Fight: What May’s IP Decisions Reward (directly on capturing position early rather than reacting). And on protecting IP before the window closes when moving into a new market, see Preparing for a New Launch (on securing rights early and managing the risk of something new reaching the market).