With new quality productive forces, the biggest fear isn't that the technology isn't new enough — it's spending money without seeing results
Biggest risk to new quality productive forces: heavy spend, no real productivity gain. Policy bans bubble-chasing and abuse. Robots≠smart manufacturing; MES≠efficiency; LLM≠AI transformation. Real change: less downtime, fewer conflicts, earlier quality detection, captured know-how. Key battleground: traditional factories.
New Quality Productive Forces: What Is Most Feared Is Not Being Insufficiently New, but Spending Money Without Productivity
Have you noticed? When many enterprises talk about new quality productive forces, their first reaction is artificial intelligence, robots, and high-end equipment.
But here is a statement that may not be pleasant to hear:
The most dangerous enterprises in the future are not those whose technology is not advanced enough, but those that spend heavily chasing new technologies without truly improving production efficiency.
Why is that?
On October 9, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces, deploying 19 key measures.
There is a detail particularly worth attention: the document not only emphasises technological innovation, artificial intelligence, and future industries, but also specifically proposes preventing bubbles and blind pursuit of novelty, and strictly prohibits the misuse of policies in the name of developing new quality productive forces.
What does this mean?
Developing new quality productive forces cannot be judged only by how new the technology is, but also by how much real value it actually creates.
Look also at the document's arrangements for traditional industries.
It explicitly proposes using digital and intelligent technologies and green technologies to transform traditional industries and promote the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing; at the same time, it strengthens the principal role of enterprises in technological innovation, promotes the commercialisation of scientific and technological achievements, and proposes establishing a mechanism for users to assess and evaluate outcomes.
Putting these contents together reveals an important change:
In the past, we tended to understand technological innovation as a breakthrough in the laboratory or a new product developed by an enterprise.But now, technological breakthroughs alone are not enough. Technology must enter the factory and the production process, be tested in real scenarios, and ultimately become a production capability that can continuously create value.
01.What Does This Mean for Manufacturing?
A factory that buys robots does not mean it has intelligent manufacturing capability; installing an MES system does not mean production efficiency will improve; connecting to a large model certainly does not mean the enterprise has completed its AI transformation.
The real changes are:
whether equipment downtime can be reduced,whether production systems can reduce scheduling conflicts,whether quality problems can be detected earlier,and whether the process experience held by master technicians can be accumulated and reused.
So the most easily overlooked battlefield of new quality productive forces may not be the most cutting-edge new industries, but rather the large number of traditional factories that do not look new at all.
02.This Will Also Change the Competitive Rules of Industrial Software
Further extrapolating, this will also change the competitive rules of industrial software.
In the past, software companies tended to focus on feature development, project delivery, and system go-live.
In the future, customers will care more and more about:
After go-live, how much has efficiency actually improved?How much has quality loss been reduced?How much has equipment downtime been shortened?
The same applies to AI. Adding a chat window to existing software is not what intelligence means; rather, it is letting AI truly participate in analysis, judgment, and business execution, and continuously verifying its effects in actual production.
Of course, this does not mean that foundational technologies and frontier innovation are unimportant. Quite the opposite: truly competitive enterprises must have both the ability to achieve technological breakthroughs and the ability to turn technology into productivity.
03.What Does Competition in New Quality Productive Forces Ultimately Come Down To?
In the final analysis, competition in new quality productive forces is not about who chases the most trends, but about:
who can turn the same resources into more, better, and more stable output.
What do you think? For Chinese manufacturing, in the next stage, what is most worth prioritising: more advanced new technologies, or truly unlocking the efficiency of existing factories?