Innovations in technology and scenario-based applications empower all sectors

Editor's note: Jin Jun is an associate professor at the School of Management, Zhejiang University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN. It has been translated from Chinese and edited for brevity and clarity.

China's 2025 Central Economic Work Conference has called for enhancing innovation-driven development to accelerate the cultivation of new growth drivers and developing new quality productive forces according to local conditions. In the course of industrial transformation and upgrading and economic growth, the development of new technologies and products lays the groundwork for the discovery and upgrading of new scenario-based applications. In turn, new scenario-based applications drive the adoption, diffusion, and iteration of new technologies and products. 

Innovations in technology and their application in real-world scenarios generate new market demand, unlock the value of novel solutions, create new business models, and inject dynamic momentum into high-quality development.

On the one hand, innovation in scenario-based applications can fully capitalize on China's advantages as a super-large market with abundant application scenarios. By integrating local resource endowments and industrial strengths, it promotes the integration of technology with local industries, drives the industrialization and scaling of new technologies, and accelerates industrial upgrading.

On the other hand, innovations in scenario-based applications, grounded in industrial logic, connect strategic emerging industries with future industries and use this linkage as a central axis to integrate value chains such as industrial chains, innovation chains, and supply chains. This helps build a modern industrial system oriented toward the development of new quality productive forces, accelerates the growth of future industries, speeds up the expansion of new business forms, and creates new engines of economic growth.

Applications of AI technologies are reshaping industrial systems, driving emerging industries, and advancing industrial upgrading.

On the one hand, the emergence of intelligent-native enterprises signals that AI technologies will be embedded across all aspects of enterprise innovation, production, organization, and management, becoming integral and triggering profound organizational transformation. Both corporate and industry logic will be reconfigured thereafter. Empowered by AI technologies, enterprises' research and development (R&D) processes and management systems for new technologies and products will evolve into new generative innovation systems, characterized by self-organization and self-learning, integrating new technologies, products and application scenarios.

On the other hand, the application of AI technologies will accelerate R&D and the large-scale development of new industries such as the low-altitude economy and bio-manufacturing, expediting the formation of new engines of economic growth. For example, AI applications can speed up new drug development and reduce the costs of clinical trials.

Scenario-based applications in the form of (quasi-)public goods will accelerate the diffusion of new technologies and the formation of new industries.

On the one hand, an increasing number of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, aerospace technologies, and low-altitude systems, are emerging. These technologies have extensive application scenarios in the field of public services. For example, brain-computer interface technologies and exoskeleton robots can help persons with disabilities and older adults enjoy a better quality of life. Therefore, the development of vertically specialized application scenarios designed for public-interest purposes will accelerate the commercialization of technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and embodied intelligence, while giving rise to new consumption demand and new markets in areas such as smart eldercare.

On the other hand, promoting technologies and products in the form of (quasi-)public goods and through non-profit organizations can enhance social acceptance of new technologies and products, accelerate technological diffusion and their applications in other industries, and generate new sources of economic momentum. 

In sum, by adapting measures to local conditions, leveraging distinctive regional industrial characteristics and resource endowments, and developing a set of differentiated, regionally distinctive application scenarios in emerging fields and tracks, such as artificial intelligence, the digital economy, and the low-altitude economy, China can promote the deep integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation. This will advance the commercialization and large-scale development of industries including quantum technologies, bio-manufacturing, brain-computer interfaces, and embodied intelligence. Meanwhile, it will also create new engines of economic growth and accelerate the building of a unified national market through regional cooperation and industrial linkage, thus achieving greater breakthroughs in improving the quality and effectiveness of economic development.