On July 27, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Small, Quick, Light, and Precise Digital Products and Services Cultivation Guidelines (2026 Edition)", emphasizing the need to enhance the quality and efficiency of digital transformation services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The guidelines standardize the cultivation of "small, quick, light, and precise" digital products and services, directing digital service providers to align with the specialized and innovative development needs of SMEs. This aims to strengthen supply-demand matching, optimize the service supply ecosystem, and continuously reduce transformation costs while improving outcomes and driving deeper digitalization.
The guidelines are demand-driven, focusing on key pain points in SME transformation. They guide products to excel in being small, quick, light, and precise, using high-quality supply to encourage SMEs to actively embrace transformation. Additionally, they emphasize localized and categorized cultivation, encouraging regions to adapt standards based on actual conditions in key industries, establish a tiered cultivation system, and promote continuous iteration of these products and services.
Small-Scale Cultivation
The guidelines stress deep scenario focus, knowledge intensity, and functional concentration. Digital products should target core application scenarios within specific industries, avoiding "big and comprehensive" feature bloat. By leveraging industry knowledge, they provide highly tailored solutions. Product design must prioritize the digital needs of SMEs' critical business processes, achieving breakthrough points that drive broader impact, and adapt to common software and hardware configurations.
Quick Cultivation
This aspect emphasizes low-barrier deployment, short implementation cycles, and efficient service. Digital products should shorten the time from purchase to use, with comprehensive training and after-sales support to ensure rapid adoption and ongoing responsiveness. Deployment models like modular selection, lightweight setups, cloud-based services, and out-of-the-box solutions are encouraged. User interfaces should be simple and intuitive, matching SME cognitive habits, with free after-sales service and 7x24-hour instant response support.
Lightweight Cultivation
The guidelines highlight high compatibility, customizability, and easy migration. Digital products must support integration with other platforms and data migration across systems to avoid "data silos" and "vendor lock-in," enabling flexible expansion and upgrades. They also encourage low-code or no-code methods, such as graphical drag-and-drop or form configuration, allowing SMEs to customize products based on their needs, lowering technical barriers and costs.
Precise Cultivation
This focuses on quantifiable results, perceptible value, and demand matching. Digital products should precisely address SME needs in innovation, quality improvement, cost reduction, efficiency gains, green practices, and safety. They must evolve based on user satisfaction feedback, targeting pain points, difficulties, and bottlenecks in specialized and innovative development. Products should deliver tangible, measurable outcomes in accelerating innovation, enhancing quality, reducing costs, improving efficiency, and promoting green, low-carbon operations.
Digital Intelligence Deployment
The guidelines also address "digital intelligence," emphasizing data integration and intelligent efficiency. Digital products should align with AI trends, deeply integrate AI technology, explore the value of industry data elements, and deepen innovative AI applications to empower SMEs' intelligent upgrades. Products should evolve from rule-based logical reasoning and decision support to multi-modal sensing, prediction, and autonomous execution, fostering deep AI integration in SMEs.
Common Foundation Requirements
The guidelines specify that "small, quick, light, and precise" products and services must meet basic requirements for safety, stability, reliability, and transparent pricing. Service providers should closely align with SME needs for innovation, quality, cost, efficiency, green practices, and safety, promoting supply-demand matching and accelerating digital transformation. These guidelines serve as a reference for local SME authorities in selecting and cultivating such products and services.
Yuan Shuai, co-founder of the New Wisdom New Quality Productivity Forum, views the guidelines as a targeted policy response to common issues like supply-demand mismatch, high transformation barriers, and insufficient practical results in SME digitalization. The core goal is to systematically optimize the digital service ecosystem from the supply side, solving the long-standing dilemma where SMEs "want to transform but don't know how, find costs too high, or see no real benefits." This will make digital transformation a key support for SMEs' specialized and innovative development paths.
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