The central authorities recently said China will improve the system and mechanism for developing new quality productive forces and establish an input growth mechanism for the development of future industries.
A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is advancing at a fast pace, giving birth to new industries such as humanoid robots, brain-computer interfaces and quantum information. Future industries serve not only as an important engine for the development of new quality productive forces, but are also the key to holding the strategic initiative in international competition.
Vigorously cultivating future industries has become China’s strategic choice to lead scientific and technological progress, promote industrial upgrading and open up a new development track.
Future industries are emerging industries that are of strategic importance but have uncertain prospects. An important feature is that they are in the incubation stage or the early stage of industrialization that needs sustainable and long-term investment for their incubation and cultivation. This means the country must establish an investment growth mechanism for future industries.
The country must devise a top-level design and forward-looking layout for future industries and solve the problem of “where to invest”. The incubation of future industries has high uncertainty, and their technologies have multi-route iteration, which makes “where to invest” a problem with certain technical thresholds. In some places, there is still a sense of fear that future industries are out of reach, or in some places, the projects for future industries are excessively launched without overall planning. Therefore, the country must strengthen forward-looking planning and policy guidance, adopt an overall approach to optimize the layout of future industries, and avoid different regions and departments “sowing respective seeds, and spreading respective fertilizer”.
The country should also offer a good institutional guarantee and policy support to solve the problem of “who leads the investment”. Governments at all levels must give full play to the leverage effect and guiding role of official funds and vigorously support the integrated development of scientific and technological and industrial innovation. To support future industries, it is necessary to improve the linkage mechanism between government research and development funds, industrial guidance funds, and market-based investment funds, and support the participation of various long-term funds such as insurance funds and social security funds according to the law.
At the same time, the country should also encourage scientific research institutions and enterprises to increase investment in the exploration of new technologies and new models through tax subsidies and other means.