Small and medium-sized enterprises are moving towards "specialization and special innovation"

Workers are installing equipment on the production line of Hebei Xindadi Mechanical and Electrical Manufacturing Co., Ltd., a national specialized special new "little giant" enterprise in Zhengding County, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province.

Photo by Zhang Xiaofeng (Zhongjing Vision)

The outline of the "14th Five-Year Plan" proposes to promote small and medium-sized enterprises to enhance their professional advantages, and cultivate specialized new "small giant" enterprises and single champion enterprises in the manufacturing industry. The Central Economic Work Conference called for the emergence of a large number of "specialized, specialized, and new" enterprises. This year's "Government Work Report" proposes to focus on cultivating "specialized and specialized" enterprises, and give strong support in terms of capital, talents, and incubation platform construction. Under the guidance of many policy supports, the "14th Five-Year Plan" period will be an important stage for small and medium-sized enterprises to move towards "specialization and innovation".

Play a platform role

"The Government Work Report requires support from the construction of incubation platforms, which means that the state attaches more importance to incubation platforms and will drive more small and medium-sized enterprises to take the road of high-quality development through incubation platforms." Wang Jing, an analyst at CCID Consulting Investment and Financing Research Center, believes that the establishment of an incubation platform should give full play to the advantages of large-scale leading enterprises in research and development, innovation, management, market, supply chain, professional services, etc., so that small and medium-sized enterprises related to the industrial chain and with innovative capabilities can share these high-quality resources on the platform, and support more small and medium-sized enterprises to develop in the direction of specialization, refinement, specialization and novelty.

Sun Wenkai, vice president of the National Institute of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises of Chinese Min University, believes that the role of platform carriers such as the public service demonstration platform for small and medium-sized enterprises and the demonstration base for entrepreneurship and innovation of small and micro enterprises should be brought into play. All localities should encourage specialized new "little giant" enterprises and large enterprises to jointly build industrial innovation alliances, carry out common technology research and development, realize the sharing of innovation capabilities, achievement transformation and brand collaboration among large and small enterprises, and form a financial industrial ecology of order-based research and development, delivery innovation, and supply chain interconnection.

The government set up a stage for enterprises to sing. The "Maker Beijing 2021" SME Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition provides a broad stage for the financial development of large and medium-sized enterprises. "Chain owners take market demand as the traction to guide small and medium-sized enterprises to accelerate breakthroughs in key links of the industrial chain and jointly build the ecological foundation of the industrial chain." Wang Lei, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, introduced that Guolian Wanzhong Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. drove Beijing Gallium Chuang Technology Co., Ltd. to break through the preparation of 2-inch gallium oxide single crystal and the production process of 4-inch epitaxial wafers to realize the industrialization of gallium oxide monocrystalline and epitaxial related products; Huawei Kunpeng works closely with small and medium-sized enterprises to jointly develop an intelligent security event management platform for car companies.

"However, it should also be noted that at present, the incubation platform still has the problems of a single operating model, insufficient professional service capabilities, and low openness and interactivity." Wang Jing suggested that in the next step, the incubation platform can improve its professional service capabilities by carrying out investment and financing docking, entrepreneurial counseling and training, intellectual property transactions, and business resource links.

Liang Zhifeng, director of the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that by 2025, through the "double creation" of small and medium-sized enterprises, we will incubate 1 million innovative small and medium-sized enterprises, cultivate 100,000 provincial "specialized and special new" small and medium-sized enterprises, 10,000 specialized and special new "small giant" enterprises, and 1,000 single champion enterprises in the manufacturing industry, and gradually build a "million thousand" high-quality small and medium-sized enterprise gradient cultivation system.

Build a solid talent base

"At present, the development of small and medium-sized enterprises is still facing the dilemma of lack of talents." Zhu Yu, vice president of the China Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, explained that at the research and development end, the flow of technical talents of "specialized and specialized" small and medium-sized enterprises is large and difficult to cultivate, especially those engaged in software development and information services, facing fierce competition from Internet head enterprises and large enterprises in the same industry; at the manufacturing end, young people tend to choose jobs with higher degrees of freedom such as express delivery, live broadcasting, and online car-hailing. To this end, Zhu Yu gave specific suggestions: experts from large enterprises can become "Sunday engineers" and take one day a week to solve technical problems in small and medium-sized enterprises; build an industry-university-research exchange platform, increase R&D cooperation, and promote the two-way flow of scientific research talents.

"Most small and medium-sized enterprises have a relatively short development time, lack talent management experience, and there is still a big gap between management concepts and capabilities and the international advanced level." Ming Feng, deputy director of Jiangsu Provincial Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Development Center, introduced that in order to help enterprises standardize the management system, the high-quality development inspection activities of "specialized and special new" enterprises have been carried out.

Jiangsu China Textile Union Knitting Co., Ltd. takes wool clothing as the main line and independently designs hundreds of styles of products every year. In 2020, the company participated in the rounds of human resource management. The inspection team put forward opinions on salary structure, performance appraisal, talent promotion, cultural system, etc., and the company standardized the management system, improved the talent cultivation mechanism, and greatly improved the enthusiasm of employees.

Wang Jing suggested that for the key links and key areas of the key industrial chain, policies such as equity incentives and housing subsidies should be used to accelerate the introduction of talents, attract a group of top innovative talents for use by enterprises; establish a scientific and fair talent evaluation mechanism, and continuously improve the scientific research working environment and quality of life of high-level innovative scientific and technological talents. At the same time, around the needs of the enterprise's own innovation and development, we will actively unite colleges and universities and scientific research institutions to establish a continuous talent training mechanism, promote the construction of talent training bases such as postdoctoral workstations, academician expert workstations, and talent small highlands, continuously improve their own talent quality, and create a mechanism conducive to talent retention.

How to attract high-end talents has also made it difficult for Tian Tian, CEO of Beijing Ruilai Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., who admitted to reporters that technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises often lack competitiveness in attracting talents, and it is difficult to introduce high-level technical talents and management backbones. "Beijing has given policy preferences to high-tech industries such as artificial intelligence." Tian Tian said that for example, to provide settlement support for specific talents recruited by specialized new "little giant" enterprises; in order to strengthen the talent support of small and medium-sized enterprises, relevant government departments have promoted cooperation between enterprises and universities, scientific research institutes and other units, participated in the construction of discipline teams in colleges and universities, jointly carried out project research, and alleviated the shortage of research and development talents for small and medium-sized enterprises.

In view of the shortcomings of small and medium-sized enterprises in cultivating talents and teachers, Fu Wei, associate researcher of the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, suggested that we should innovate the training mode of skilled talents, develop standardized, systematic and standardized high-quality courses on the basis of existing curriculum resources, absorb high-quality digital course resources in various industries, and build a "digital academy".

Accelerate digital transformation

With the rapid development of new generation information technology such as 5G, industrial Internet, and big data, digitalization has become an effective means to lead small and medium-sized enterprises to move towards "specialization and newness".

Shanghai Huasu Navigation Technology Co., Ltd. is a specialized new "little giant" enterprise cultivated by the local government, focusing on the research and development, production and sales of high-precision satellite navigation positioning related software and hardware technology products. "We use multiple integrated systems to build a digital intelligence platform for the whole value chain, create an agile supply chain system from planning to manufacturing, and effectively enhance the core competitiveness of enterprise development." Gao Zhanwu, the company's financial director, said.

Actively embracing digitalization is also the two-sided needle (Jiangsu) Industrial Co., Ltd., as a specialized new "little giant" enterprise in the field of hotel daily necessities, the company under the guidance of the Jiangsu Provincial Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Development Center, in this year to establish a full equipment and quality management system, through the key control points and material balance management system, improve work efficiency and pass rate.

"The digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises will accelerate their intelligent transformation and optimize the allocation of production and service resources in a wider range, with greater efficiency and more precision." One of the most effective ways is to help networked flexible production through the industrial Internet platform. Fu Wei took Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, as an example, to tell reporters the story of the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises that took place here.

At the beginning of 2021, Jinjiang City signed a tripartite agreement with Huawei and All Things Smart Connect Technology Co., Ltd. to help more small and medium-sized enterprises break through technical barriers. Through data upgrading, we will solve the pain points of enterprises in the industry with low punctuality rate, high inventory, unstable quality, lagging data, and high communication costs, and achieve the goal of external supply chain coordination and internal management data smoothness. "At present, more than 90% of enterprises in Jinjiang City have achieved 'touching the net', 101 enterprises have passed the standard through the integration of the two management systems, and more than 1,000 enterprises have gone to the cloud platform." Fu Wei said.

Promoting the application of the Industrial Internet in small and medium-sized enterprises is an accelerator to enhance their innovation ability and professional level. The "List of Practical Things to Do for "Specialized, Specialized and New" SMALL and Medium-sized Enterprises" proposes that by the end of 2022, more than 100 industrial Internet platforms and digital transformation service providers will be organized, digital transformation services will be provided for more than 100,000 small and medium-sized enterprises, and 100,000 small and medium-sized enterprises will be promoted to "go to the cloud".

How to achieve this goal, Ye Dingda, a first-level inspector of the SME Bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the digital services of smes should be optimized from the aspects of encouraging smes to use digital means to form cross-enterprise collaborative networks, supporting traditional industrial clusters to build "virtual" industrial platforms, encouraging the cultivation of virtual industrial clusters, building a digital public technical service platform for small and medium-sized enterprises, and organizing the release of typical experiences and cases of digital transformation, so as to provide strong support for the high-quality development of small and medium-sized enterprises. (Economic Daily reporter Li Pengda)