Seven government departments have jointly released a new three-year action plan aimed at significantly enhancing collaborative development between large, medium, and small enterprises within China's platform economy by 2028.
The plan, titled the "Action Plan for Promoting Collaborative Development of Large, Medium, and Small Enterprises in the Platform Economy (2026-2028)," outlines key targets. These include establishing replicable models for collaborative innovation and nurturing a group of "manufacturing champion" enterprises specialized in the platform economy sector.
Industry experts highlight that the framework is built around three core systems: innovation synergy, ecosystem synergy, and openness synergy. This structure provides a clear roadmap for high-quality development in the platform economy. A central focus is deepening open collaboration by breaking down barriers to the flow of production factors.
The initiative mandates platform companies to compile and regularly publish "open lists" detailing the scope and rules for sharing resources. This institutional approach is designed to systematically tackle long-standing collaboration challenges between enterprises of different scales.
Specific quantitative goals are set for 2028. Authorities plan to select over 100 pilot projects for open platform resource scenarios. Additionally, the plan aims to establish more than 10 service platforms and develop at least 60 practical, deployable intelligent service application scenarios.
The platform economy, characterized by internet platforms hosting a symbiotic ecosystem of large and small businesses, plays a vital role in fostering innovation, driving industrial upgrading, and cultivating new growth drivers. The current phase is seen as a critical period for its transformation and upgrading.
Yu Xiaohui, President of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), stated that the three synergistic systems construct a clear action framework. He described the plan as a pivotal move to resolve systemic collaboration bottlenecks and industry development constraints through institutional means, ultimately strengthening the foundation for digital and intelligent development.
Prioritizing Innovation Synergy
The plan places "innovation synergy" at the forefront to address imbalances in development between large and small firms. In terms of technological innovation, it guides platform enterprises to bolster their innovation layout in areas like general-purpose large models, industry-specific large models, and intelligent agents. It also encourages accelerating R&D breakthroughs in key frontier technologies.
A notable mechanism introduced is supporting platform companies to "post challenges" and enabling small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to "accept these challenges," guiding SMEs to deepen their expertise in specialized technical fields.
For industrial innovation, the plan supports joint efforts by platforms and SMEs to focus on emerging and future industries. The goal is to promote the large-scale application and demonstration of new technologies, products, and scenarios, accelerating the formation of internationally competitive advanced manufacturing clusters and strategic emerging industrial clusters.
Enabling Ecosystem and Open Resource Flow
The strategy also emphasizes building a robust collaborative ecosystem through shared compliance, industrial resources, services, and global expansion. It supports leading enterprises in constructing industrial internet platforms to facilitate upstream and downstream SMEs in utilizing these platforms.
Furthermore, it encourages specialized industrial internet platform companies to aggregate lightweight, rapid, and precise digital intelligence products and solutions for SMEs, deepening vertical industry service capabilities.
He Ying, Director of the Planning Institute at CCID Think Tank, noted that the platform economy represents an expansion of the manufacturing sector's domain. She emphasized that internet platform companies should leverage their foundations in AI, algorithms, and computing power to better integrate with manufacturing firms,打通协同生态 (打通协同生态) and deploy advantages for future industries.
In recent years, leading platform companies have amassed vast data, advanced algorithms, and substantial computing power, but these resources have largely remained within internal cycles without established mechanisms for regular, low-cost external opening.
Yu Xiaohui analyzed that the plan addresses this by深化开放协同 (深化开放协同) and打通要素流通的关卡 (打通要素流通的关卡). By having platform firms publish open lists and establish rules, and by building public service platforms for collaborative development, resources become "visible" and "usable" for SMEs.
The plan also ensures resources can "flow effectively." It promotes the integrated, synergistic opening of technical capabilities, data elements, and computing resources. This includes using lightweight digital intelligence services and pilot-scale production services to lower innovation barriers, leveraging trusted data spaces and high-quality datasets to unlock data value, and optimizing resource allocation through computing power monitoring, scheduling, and普惠服务 (普惠服务). This forms a complete cycle from lowering innovation thresholds to optimizing factor allocation, enabling resources to truly circulate within the platform ecosystem and unleash a multiplier effect.
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