A new initiative has been launched to advance the platform economy and improve integration among businesses of varying scales.
Seven government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, have jointly issued an action plan aimed at fostering collaborative development within the platform economy from 2026 to 2028. This plan outlines a clear roadmap for upgrading the platform economy and enhancing connectivity between large, medium, and small enterprises.
Understanding the Platform Economy
As a modern economic model, the platform economy utilizes internet platforms to connect diverse business entities, including major platform companies, numerous small and medium-sized merchants, and service providers. This model is increasingly recognized for its role in empowering the real economy.
In recent years, the platform economy's function in linking supply and demand, driving transformation, and promoting employment has become more prominent. Platform enterprises have evolved beyond their traditional roles as information intermediaries and matchmakers. They are now emerging as new digital infrastructures that integrate data, technology, and application scenarios, serving as crucial support for the digital transformation of smaller businesses.
Addressing Current Challenges
However, significant challenges remain, including insufficient industry collaboration, uneven development among enterprises, and inefficient flow of essential resources. Authorities note that the platform economy is at a critical juncture for transformation and upgrading, necessitating a new development ecosystem that is innovative, integrated, healthy, and efficient.
The action plan places a strong emphasis on the concept of "collaboration." It aims to address structural contradictions in the development of enterprises within the platform economy by constructing a multi-dimensional collaborative framework. This approach is designed to ensure the orderly and efficient flow of resources within the ecosystem.
Key Focus Areas for Collaboration
The plan prioritizes several key areas to achieve its goals. First, it focuses on strengthening innovation synergy to solidify the industry's foundation. This involves guiding platform companies to enhance their innovation layout in areas like general-purpose large models, industry-specific models, and AI agents. The plan also supports the creation of incubators for smaller businesses and accelerates the cultivation of AI-driven micro-enterprises. These measures aim to resolve resource misallocation in the innovation chain and tackle the challenge of uncoordinated innovation between enterprises of different sizes.
Second, the plan promotes ecological synergy to build an inclusive market environment. A key aspect is reshaping the relationship between platforms and small and medium-sized enterprises to foster a fair, transparent, standardized, and efficient cooperative ecosystem. The action plan includes initiatives to improve the quality and branding of smaller businesses, supports collaborative international expansion, and strengthens platform compliance. These efforts are intended to create a synergistic system encompassing compliance, industry, services, and global outreach, enabling mutual empowerment between platforms and the smaller enterprises within their ecosystems.
Third, the plan seeks to deepen open collaboration to facilitate the circulation of resources and elements. While openness is a natural attribute of the platform economy, questions about what to open, to whom, and how remain complex. The action plan calls for an open collaborative expansion effort, including accelerating the formulation of platform openness lists. It guides platform enterprises to open up and share technical resources, data, and computing power with smaller businesses. This package of measures is designed to make resources visible, usable, and mobile, thereby continuously removing barriers to the flow of essential elements.
Looking Ahead
Looking forward, 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 grow more complex. Industry observers suggest that all stakeholders should use the implementation of this action plan as a starting point. The goal is to strive to build an open, shared, multi-party cooperative, and innovation-active platform economy development system. This would allow large enterprises to gain ecological vitality through capability openness and enable smaller businesses to unleash their innovative potential through resource flow, ultimately forming a virtuous cycle of value co-creation and mutual benefit to elevate the platform economy to a new level of development.
Comments