As major e-commerce platforms gear up for the "618" shopping festival, a profound transformation within the platform economy ecosystem is quietly unfolding.
On June 18th, seven government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, released the "Action Plan for Promoting the Collaborative Development of Large, Medium, and Small Enterprises in the Platform Economy (2026-2028)".
This document sends a clear and important signal: collaborative development among enterprises of all sizes will be a central theme shaping the future trajectory of the platform economy.
The release of this action plan signifies that China's platform economy is entering a new phase characterized by diversification and increased synergy.
For the average person, the platform economy is already a familiar part of daily life. It permeates various aspects through services like shared bikes, ride-hailing, instant food delivery, live-streaming, e-commerce, and short videos.
The data speaks volumes. The user base of major domestic platform companies has now surpassed 1 billion. It serves countless households and connects a multitude of industries, with its strategic importance growing steadily.
However, insufficient collaboration remains a key challenge for the industry. In the era of artificial intelligence, competition among platform companies has intensified, evolving beyond single products or sectors into a comprehensive contest involving innovation chains, industrial chains, supply chains, capital chains, and talent networks.
Promoting collaborative development among large, medium, and small enterprises has been positioned as a critical element for the platform economy's transformation.
The ability to navigate this path of collaborative development will determine whether the platform economy can truly seize the opportunities presented by technological and industrial change and secure its strategic position in the new AI era.
Collaboration is not merely about simple addition; it involves deep-level sharing of underlying market, capital, technological, and information resources.
The platform economy exhibits typical two-sided market characteristics. Large platform enterprises occupy a central position in the ecosystem, acting as the "critical few" that control technology, data, and rules. Meanwhile, the vast number of small and medium-sized merchants, service providers, and consumers form the "overwhelming majority" that constitutes the foundation of the ecosystem.
Effectively managing the relationship between the "few" and the "many" is an essential task for driving the high-quality development of the platform economy.
The action plan outlines three key approaches to address this. The first is innovation collaboration, which is given top priority.
Innovation activities within the platform economy show a distinct divergence. Leading platform companies, leveraging their financial and technological advantages, have built significant reserves in cutting-edge fields. In contrast, the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises, constrained by R&D budgets, talent, and experimental conditions, often focus their innovations on the application and business model layers.
To address the resource misallocation within the "innovation chain," the action plan deploys a collaborative innovation navigation initiative. This aims to use scientific and technological innovation as the source, guide with industrial innovation, and radiate through service innovation, thereby improving the cultivation mechanism for innovation entities and strengthening the support system for innovative development.
This suite of measures is designed to tackle the problem of uncoordinated innovation development between enterprises of different sizes. The second approach is ecosystem collaboration, which is key to achieving synergistic development.
In theory, all participants in a platform ecosystem are complementary and jointly create value. However, in practice, due to unequal status among different market entities, they still face implicit constraints related to rules, algorithms, and technology.
Against this backdrop, the action plan deploys an ecosystem collaboration enhancement initiative. It proposes building a four-in-one collaborative system encompassing compliance, industry, services, and international expansion.
These multi-pronged measures aim to foster mutual empowerment between platforms and the small and medium-sized entities within their ecosystems. The third approach is open collaboration, which represents an urgent current task.
"Openness is an inherent attribute of the platform economy," one expert noted. The fundamental questions of "what to open, to whom, and how to open" have long been deep-seated issues hindering collaboration among enterprises of all sizes.
In response, the action plan proposes focusing on areas such as opening up technological capabilities, data elements, and computing power resources. It calls for precise deployment of measures to foster a thriving open-source ecosystem, create trusted data spaces, and deepen actions for computing power interconnectivity.
The platform economy is now at a new starting line, driven by collaborative innovation rather than just competition for traffic. As the hands of the "few" and the "many" join together, the future of the platform economy will depend on the depth of its ecosystem and the height of its innovation.
Comments