Small and medium-sized enterprises serve as a vital force driving innovation, boosting employment, and improving people's livelihoods, and they are also key players in cultivating new quality productive forces.

At present, digital technology is reshaping the paradigm of innovation, while data ownership, copyright of AI-generated content, and cross-border intellectual property disputes bring entirely new challenges.

From the perspective of advancing Chinese-style modernization as a whole, improving the intellectual property strategy of SMEs and connecting the entire chain of innovation, creation, protection, and application is of great significance to building an IP powerhouse and achieving high-level self-reliance and strength in science and technology.

According to statistics, by the end of 2025, China had cultivated more than 600,000 technology-based and innovative SMEs cumulatively, over 140,000 specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative SMEs, and more than 17,600 national-level specialized and innovative "little giant" enterprises.

The average R&D investment intensity of "little giant" enterprises reached 7 percent, and each held an average of 26.6 invention patents.

A large number of SMEs have deeply participated in major national projects such as manned spaceflight and the C919 large passenger aircraft, becoming an important support for the upgrading of the industrial base.

At the same time, many SMEs have weak awareness of intellectual property, exhibiting the phenomenon of "manufacturing without innovation, innovation without property rights, property rights without application, and application without protection."

Their R&D investment intensity still falls short of the benchmark for competing in the market, and their reserves of high-value patents are insufficient.

Some technology-based SMEs also commonly suffer from shortcomings such as inadequate patent information search capabilities and weak capacity to respond to intellectual property litigation.

The external institutional environment also presents constraints.

Intellectual property support policies suffer from the problem of being too broad-based and not targeted enough; some policies have high application thresholds, and the costs of patent maintenance and overseas layout are a heavy burden for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Intellectual property service resources are unevenly distributed geographically, with most service institutions concentrated in the eastern region, while public service supply in the central and western regions still has shortcomings.

In particular, the iteration speed of artificial intelligence technology, represented by large models, far exceeds the pace of revision of traditional legal systems.

New problems continue to emerge, such as the copyright boundaries of training data, the ownership of copyright in AI-generated content, and the difficulty of determining infringement under the algorithm black box.

These amplify the risks of the innovation system and pose practical questions for adaptive reform of the intellectual property system.

Looking globally, some countries have accumulated certain practical experience in supporting intellectual property for SMEs, but intellectual property systems are deeply rooted in each country's own economic and social soil and carry the limitations of their own development stages, so they absolutely cannot be simply copied or transplanted.

Next, we should adhere to the principle of being self-centered and serving our own purposes, dialectically identify and absorb useful foreign experience, firmly base ourselves on the realities of China's industrial development, coordinate traditional industrial upgrading with governance in emerging AI fields, and build a multi-dimensional development pattern of "innovation-driven, intellectual property safeguarded."

We should consolidate enterprises' primary responsibility and build a full-lifecycle intellectual property strategy suited to their own development.

SMEs should elevate intellectual property to a core business strategy, abandon the mindset of "emphasizing quantity over quality," conduct patent navigation and infringement risk screening, and make coordinated use of multiple protection tools such as patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.

They should establish a full-chain compliance system covering R&D, operations, and overseas expansion, attach importance to retaining ownership of AI-generated content and reviewing the legality of training data sources, and make good use of new technologies such as blockchain evidence preservation to solidify creative evidence, thereby building the "first line of defense" against innovation risks.

For micro and small enterprises, they may rely on third-party professional institutions and adopt an intellectual property trusteeship model to make up for management shortcomings.

We should optimize government institutional supply and create an inclusive and precise policy support system.

On the one hand, we should improve laws and regulations, implement the arrangements of the Outline for Building an Intellectual Property Powerhouse (2021-2035), optimize the mechanism for reducing patent application and annual fee maintenance costs, increase support for cultivating high-value patents for specialized and innovative enterprises, improve overseas rights protection assistance mechanisms, and effectively reduce the cost of rights protection and litigation response for enterprises.

On the other hand, we should upgrade public service platforms, promote patent early-warning services, build a public database of expired patents, make up for shortcomings in intellectual property public services in the central and western regions, and provide one-stop services for SMEs in patent search, analysis, and rights protection.

We should advance the adaptive reconstruction of the intellectual property system for new business forms, actively participate in consultations on international rules, and continuously enhance China's voice in emerging fields.

We should strengthen financial and talent safeguards and open up channels for transforming the value of intellectual property.

We should expand the coverage of intellectual property pledge financing, establish risk compensation funds, explore intellectual property securitization models, and solve the real dilemma of SMEs finding it "hard to turn intellectual property into assets."

We should improve the talent cultivation system, strengthen the training of interdisciplinary intellectual property talents in colleges and universities, and carry out regular practical training for SME operators and R&D personnel.

We should encourage the formation of industry intellectual property alliances to collectively respond to cross-border intellectual property disputes and enhance the industry's overall bargaining power and risk resistance.

We should promote deep industry-university-research collaboration and facilitate the commercialization of innovative achievements.

We should guide SMEs to carry out cooperative R&D with universities and research institutes, clarify in advance the agreements on intellectual property ownership during cooperation, deeply implement special actions for patent transformation and application, promote the flow of high-value patents to SMEs, and guide more SMEs to participate in the formulation of industry standards, thereby achieving "technological patenting, patent standardization, and standardization industrialization."