Recently, seven departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Action Plan for Promoting Collaborative Development Between Large and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Platform Economy (2026-2028)", outlining a clear action path to drive the transformation and upgrading of the platform economy and foster integrated development between enterprises of all sizes.
What is the platform economy? As a new economic form, it uses internet platforms as a carrier to connect diverse business entities such as large platform enterprises, a vast number of small and medium-sized businesses, and service providers. In Anshan, Liaoning, the intelligent supply chain service platform built by Delin Landport Supply Chain Service Co., Ltd., integrates one-stop services including online transactions, smart logistics, warehousing, and distribution, attracting over 40,000 enterprises and customers from the upstream and downstream steel industry chain.
"We rely on technologies like big data and the Internet of Things to build a service platform, gradually realizing a transition from a traditional logistics enterprise to a modern supply chain service enterprise," said company chairman Wang Feng.
Connecting supply and demand, advancing transformation, promoting employment... In recent years, the role of China's platform economy in empowering the real economy has become increasingly prominent. In particular, platform enterprises have moved beyond their traditional attributes as information intermediaries and matchmakers, evolving into new digital infrastructure that integrates elements like data, technology, and scenarios, becoming a crucial support for empowering the transformation and development of small and medium-sized enterprises.
However, at the same time, issues such as insufficient industry collaboration, uneven development among enterprises, and inefficient flow of factors urgently need to be resolved. A relevant official from the Information and Communication Administration of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that the development of China's platform economy is at a critical juncture of transformation and upgrading. There is an urgent need to grasp the new situations and requirements brought by the "15th Five-Year Plan" period for socio-economic development and technological-industrial changes, and to accelerate the construction of an innovative, integrated, healthy, and efficient development ecosystem.
Reviewing the action plan, the word "collaboration" is heavily emphasized. "Addressing the structural contradictions in the development of large and small and medium-sized enterprises within the platform economy, the action plan uses a systems thinking approach to build a multi-dimensional collaborative framework, enabling the orderly flow and efficient allocation of factors within the ecosystem," said Yu Xiaohui, President of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
Enhancing Innovation Collaboration to Solidify the Foundation for Industrial Development
The action plan guides platform enterprises to strengthen innovation layouts in artificial intelligence areas like general-purpose large models, industry-specific large models, and intelligent agents; supports qualified regions in building incubators for small and medium-sized enterprises; and accelerates the cultivation of one-person AI companies. The action plan places "innovation collaboration" at the forefront of its key tasks and makes a series of arrangements.
Yu Xiaohui believes that the situation where some large enterprises have technology but lack application scenarios, while some small enterprises have ideas but lack resources, has led to a misallocation of resources on the "innovation chain." The action plan's deployment around scientific and technological innovation, industrial innovation, and innovation services will help solve the problem of uncoordinated innovation development between large and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Advancing Ecosystem Collaboration to Build an Inclusive Market Environment
Reshaping the relationship between platforms and small and medium-sized enterprises, and building a more fair, transparent, standardized, orderly, and efficiently cooperative platform ecosystem, is key to achieving collaborative development. The action plan proposes carrying out actions to improve ecosystem collaboration, increasing support for quality improvement and brand building for small and medium-sized enterprises, supporting large and small and medium-sized enterprises in collaborating to go global, and strengthening platform operational compliance. These measures aim to build an ecosystem collaboration system covering compliance, industry, services, and global expansion, promoting mutual empowerment between platforms and the small and medium-sized enterprises within the ecosystem.
Deepening Open Collaboration to Smooth the Circulation of Resources and Factors
Openness is a natural attribute of the platform economy, but "what to open, to whom to open, and how to open" are deep-seated problems that perplex enterprises. "Breaking down data silos and smoothing the flow of factors has become an urgent task for deepening the open linkage of the platform economy," Yu Xiaohui noted. The action plan requires carrying out actions to expand open collaboration, accelerating the formulation of platform openness lists, and guiding platform enterprises to accelerate the open sharing of elements like technology, data, and computing power with small and medium-sized enterprises. This package of measures makes resources visible, usable, and mobile, continuously removing blockages in the flow of factors.
Looking ahead, as new models like "AI + platform economy" continue to evolve, the participants in the platform economy will become more diverse, and its organizational forms and operational mechanisms will become more complex. Industry insiders believe that all parties should use the implementation of the action plan as a starting point, focusing on building an open, shared, diverse, cooperative, and innovation-active development system for the platform economy. This will allow large enterprises to gain ecosystem vitality through capability openness, enable small and medium-sized enterprises to unleash their innovation potential through the flow of factors, form a virtuous cycle of value co-creation and mutual benefit, and propel the development level of the platform economy to a new stage.
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