The present paper addresses the Alberta oilfield experience and draws up a set of principles for strategic public-private alliances for innovation and export development considered useful for the Latin American countries. According to the authors the lessons to extract are not reduced to countries with abundant hydrocarbon resources, and may be also useful to broader applications as the development of innovation in resource based industries, the construction of strategic public-private alliances and consensus building, the royalty regime, the appropriate fiscal policy, securing investments in technology development and in human capital, and a stable and balanced regulatory framework. However, the authors state that the challenge to recognize the lessons is not an easy task, because of the fact that they can come not just from what occurred but also from what didn't happened.