Seven national ministries and commissions, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, have jointly released an action plan aimed at fostering collaborative development within the platform economy between 2026 and 2028. This initiative outlines a clear roadmap for transforming the platform economy and facilitating deeper integration between large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The platform economy represents a modern economic model that utilizes internet platforms to connect diverse business entities, including major platform companies and a vast number of SMEs and service providers.
In Anshan, Liaoning province, Delin Landport Supply Chain Service Co., Ltd. has developed an intelligent supply chain service platform. This platform integrates one-stop services such as online transactions, smart logistics, and warehousing distribution, attracting over 40,000 enterprises and clients from across the steel industry chain. "We have leveraged technologies like big data and the Internet of Things to build this service platform, gradually transitioning from a traditional logistics firm to a modern supply chain service enterprise," explained Wang Feng, the company's chairman.
Platforms are increasingly vital for connecting supply and demand, driving industrial transformation, and promoting employment. The role of the platform economy in empowering the real economy has become more pronounced. Platform enterprises have evolved beyond their traditional roles as information intermediaries and matchmakers, transforming into new digital infrastructures that integrate data, technology, and application scenarios, thereby becoming crucial enablers for SME transformation.
However, challenges such as insufficient industry coordination, uneven development among enterprises, and inefficient flow of production factors require urgent solutions. An official from the MIIT's information and communication bureau stated that China's platform economy is at a critical juncture of transformation and upgrading. There is a pressing need to adapt to new trends and requirements during the 15th Five-Year Plan period and accelerate the creation of an innovative, integrated, healthy, and efficient development ecosystem.
The concept of "synergy" is a central theme in the action plan. "Addressing the structural contradictions in the development of large and small enterprises within the platform economy, the plan employs a systems-thinking approach to build a multi-dimensional collaborative framework, ensuring 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 Synergy to Strengthen the Industrial Foundation
The plan prioritizes "innovation synergy" as a key task, outlining several measures. These include guiding platform companies to bolster their innovation layout in artificial intelligence areas like general-purpose large models, industry-specific models, and intelligent agents; supporting qualified regions in establishing SME incubators; and accelerating the cultivation of one-person AI companies. Yu Xiaohui noted that the current situation, where some large enterprises have technology but lack application scenarios while some SMEs have ideas but lack resources, leads to a misallocation of resources along the innovation chain. The plan's focus on technological, industrial, and service innovation aims to address the lack of coordination in innovation between large and small enterprises.
Promoting Ecosystem Synergy to Build an Inclusive Market Environment
Reshaping the relationship between platforms and SMEs to build a fairer, more transparent, standardized, and efficiently cooperative platform ecosystem is key to achieving synergistic development. The action plan proposes measures to enhance ecosystem quality, including increasing support for SMEs in quality improvement and brand building, supporting collaborative efforts for international expansion, and strengthening platform compliance. These measures aim to establish a synergistic system covering compliance, industry, services, and global outreach, fostering mutual empowerment between platforms and the SMEs within their ecosystems.
Deepening Open Synergy to Facilitate the Flow of Resources
While openness is an inherent characteristic of the platform economy, questions about what to open, to whom, and how remain deep-seated concerns for businesses. "Breaking down data silos and facilitating the flow of factors has become an urgent task for deepening open collaboration in the platform economy," Yu Xiaohui observed. The action plan calls for an open synergy expansion initiative, which involves accelerating the formulation of platform openness lists and guiding platform companies to share technical, data, and computing resources with SMEs. This suite of measures is designed to make resources visible, usable, and mobile, continuously removing barriers to factor circulation.
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 grow more complex.
Industry experts believe that all stakeholders should use the implementation of this action plan as a starting point. The focus should be on building an open, shared, diverse, cooperative, and innovation-driven platform economy development system. This will allow large enterprises to gain ecosystem vitality through capability sharing and enable SMEs to unleash their innovation potential through access to resources, ultimately fostering a virtuous cycle of value co-creation and mutual benefit, thereby elevating the overall development level of the platform economy.
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