Tian Jietang and Zhao Yong: The Role and Key Factors in Accelerating the Cultivation and Expansion of New Kinetic Energy
The Central Economic Work Conference has listed "persisting in innovation-driven development and intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy" as one of the key tasks for economic work in 2026. The essence of cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy lies in driving economic growth through innovation; this is both a current necessity for achieving short-term growth targets and deeply connected to shaping new advantages in long-term international competition. Only by adopting a rhythm of "intensifying," persisting in acting according to local conditions, and promoting the synergistic force of technological breakthroughs, industrial escalation, and scenario expansion can we better transform innovative advantages into decisive developmental victories, allowing new kinetic energy to become a powerful engine for our country’s high-quality development and sustainable growth.
Understanding the Cultivation of New Kinetic Energy through the Term "Intensifying"
Reviewing the relevant expressions from the Central Economic Work Conference in recent years shows that the policy logic of "cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy" has become increasingly clear. In 2022, the proposal was to "rely on innovation to cultivate and expand new kinetic energy for development"; in 2023, the emphasis was on "cultivating and developing new kinetic energy"; in 2024, the requirement was to "coordinate the relationship between cultivating new kinetic energy and renewing old kinetic energy"; and 2025 particularly highlighted the word "intensifying." This expression sends a strong signal with profound implications, fully illustrating the importance of cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy.
The stimulation of kinetic energy has always played a pivotal and foundational driving role in economic development. Cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy means forming new economic growth points through technological innovation, industrial innovation, and scenario innovation to promote more efficient and sustainable economic growth. This is an important deployment based on a comprehensive consideration of complex domestic and international situations with an eye toward long-term development.
From the perspective of domestic development, intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy is an urgent need to better realize the effective improvement of economic quality and the reasonable growth of quantity. Currently, the growth rates of investment and consumption in our country have slowed to varying degrees, and the pulling effect of old kinetic energy on economic growth has significantly weakened. Positive progress has been made in the cultivation of new kinetic energy; in 2024, the added value of our country’s "Three New" [1] economy accounted for over 18% of GDP, yet it still needs to be further expanded to truly shoulder the "main beam" of supporting economic development. The transition between old and new kinetic energy is still at a critical stage. On one hand, it is necessary to continue implementing a more proactive fiscal policy and a moderately loose monetary policy, increasing the intensity of counter-cyclical and cross-cyclical adjustments. On the other hand, efforts must be made to promote the organic integration of short-term stable growth with medium-to-long-term kinetic energy conversion, accelerating the cultivation and expansion of new industries, new business forms, and new models, and effectively pushing for the simultaneous rise in the quantity and quality of economic development.
Intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy also facilitates the realization of a higher-level balance between supply and demand. The balance of supply and demand is an important condition for the smooth circulation of the national economy. If supply exceeds demand, behaviors such as excessive competition, inefficient allocation of scarce resources, and even waste will occur. If supply is less than demand, the material and cultural needs of residents cannot be met, which is detrimental to improving their well-being. Currently, a certain imbalance persists between supply and demand in our country; this is related both to insufficient domestic demand—particularly consumer demand—and to problems on the supply side where innovation lags and quality does not match, making it difficult to effectively meet the people's new needs for a better life. From international experience, when per capita GDP exceeds $10,000, resident consumption shifts from a survival-oriented type to a development-oriented type, and from a primary focus on commodity consumption to equal emphasis on both commodities and services, exhibiting high-quality, diversified, and personalized characteristics. For example, relevant surveys show that people have a great demand for low-altitude economy [2] consumption, but because the construction of infrastructure such as take-off and landing points and communication, navigation, and monitoring systems lags behind, the supply potential has not yet been fully released. Likewise, the supply of services such as elderly care, childcare, and medical treatment still finds it difficult to fully meet the new demands brought by changes in demographic structures. By the end of 2024, there remained a large gap between the number of nursing-type beds in registered elderly care institutions and the number of disabled or semi-disabled elderly people in our country, and the number of childcare spots for infants and toddlers under 3 years old per thousand people was only 4.08. Solving these difficult problems urgently requires intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy to meet upgrading potential consumer demand with higher-quality supply, promote a better fit between supply and demand, and enhance the endogenous power of the domestic big circulation.
From the perspective of international trends, intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy is an inevitable choice to respond to increasingly fierce global technological competition and to firmly grasp the historical opportunities of the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation. Currently, competition among major powers is unfolding comprehensively around a new round of technological revolution. Unlike the past, this round is prominently characterized by general-purpose technologies—represented by artificial intelligence—and open-source innovation systems that are profoundly reshaping the paradigm of technological innovation, with the speed of iteration and diffusion significantly accelerating. At the same time, major countries are successively strengthening their national strategic layouts and systematically promoting technological innovation. Once a country falls behind frontier nations in key fields, it will face a passive situation where it is difficult to catch up across the board. This has caused the strategic window of opportunity for the new round of technological revolution to shorten significantly compared to the past. In this context, whether the industrialization of technological innovation achievements can be quickly achieved to form a sustainable leading advantage as early as possible has become the key to determining success or failure in international technological competition. Facing a fleeting strategic window of opportunity, we must accelerate the deep integration of technological innovation, industrial innovation, and scenario innovation, and intensify the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy.
Understanding the Internal Relationship of the Three Facets of Innovation
Kinetic energy is the source that drives the continuous expansion of a country’s or region’s economic scale and the continuous improvement of its quality, primarily including factor inputs, efficiency improvements, structural optimization, and innovation. New kinetic energy refers to the new sources and new drivers for economic growth, the core of which is innovation. Cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy covers the complete chain from scientific discovery and technological breakthroughs to product development and commercial transformation, and ultimately to industrial development. From the perspective of practical application, this can be broadly divided into three interrelated core links: technological innovation, industrial innovation, and scenario innovation.
Technological innovation is the driving engine for cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy. It includes scientific discovery and technological invention; it is the source of technological achievements and the primary task for cultivating new kinetic energy. Within this, breakthroughs in key generic technologies [3] are the priority. Only by overcoming difficult problems in key generic technologies as quickly as possible can we create the conditions for the transformation, application, and commercialization of technological innovation achievements. For example, the lag in key technologies such as high-precision gene editing, metabolite detection, and precise regulation is restricting the industrialization process of bio-manufacturing; meanwhile, technological weaknesses in fields like models, chips, operating systems, and high-end precision components also limit the development of frontier directions such as embodied intelligence. Therefore, cultivating new kinetic energy must focus on key generic technologies, increase support for technological innovation, shorten innovation cycles, improve innovation efficiency, and promote the accelerated emergence of high-quality technological innovation results.
Industrial innovation is the key link in cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy. Industrial innovation is the process of achieving large-scale production and matching it with large-scale consumption through integrated promotion. The priority lies in building a complete supporting system, a healthy industrial ecosystem, and an institutional environment conducive to innovation. Industrial innovation includes both how to achieve efficient and stable large-scale production through technological integration and process optimization, and how to use organizational change, business model innovation, and market development to ensure that supply accurately matches or even leads market demand. The former ensures the stability of product supply and cost controllability, while the latter ensures that output can fully adapt to mass demand and be transformed into actual economic growth. From a practical standpoint, many emerging industries possess technological advancement in their early stages and can achieve preliminary mass production, yet they find it difficult to develop rapidly due to immature business models, weak industrial chain support, and an incomplete industrial ecosystem. Therefore, to cultivate and expand new kinetic energy, we must accelerate the improvement of supporting systems, industrial ecosystems, and institutional environments, and promote organizational change and business model innovation, so that a dynamic balance and positive cycle are achieved between the "scale of production" and the "scale of demand."
In the process of transforming technological innovation into industrial innovation, we must also recognize the importance of scenario innovation. As the realistic carrier connecting technological achievements with market demand, scenario innovation runs through the entire process of product development and commercialization, largely influencing whether technological innovation results can be quickly and efficiently transformed and commercialized. Its focus lies in forming authentic and effective demonstration applications; it requires both precise insights into demand to achieve efficient supply-demand matching and the creation of landing scenarios that are highly feasible and easy to verify. Currently, the development of emerging and future industries faces a prominent bottleneck of insufficient application scenarios. Taking the low-altitude economy as an example, its applications are currently concentrated in fields such as agricultural plant protection, forestry monitoring, industrial inspection, power line inspection, and drone performances, while applications in scenarios such as sightseeing, urban air mobility, intercity transport, emergency rescue, and medical relief remain relatively limited, restricting the full release of industrial potential. Therefore, to cultivate and expand new kinetic energy, we must strive to strengthen scenario innovation, accelerate the collation and release of lists of scenario requirements, encourage various entities to open up high-value scenarios, deepen supply-demand matching, and accelerate the construction of supporting infrastructure for major scenarios, paving the way for the large-scale application of new technologies and products.
Taken together, technological innovation, industrial innovation, and scenario innovation each play a unique role in stimulating new kinetic energy; they are distinct yet interdependent and synergistic, together constituting the complete chain of innovation-driven economic growth. We must coordinately grasp the internal logic and interaction mechanisms of these three elements, insisting on systematic layout and integrated promotion, thereby effectively connecting the entire process from technical breakthroughs to industrial implementation, and from product development to market verification. This will fully release the overall efficacy of the innovation system and build a solid foundation for cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy.
The Key Lies in Deep Integration according to Local Conditions
Intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy is a systemic project. It requires not only the coordinated promotion of technological, industrial, and scenario innovation, but also the cultivation of an innovation ecosystem, the construction of regional innovation systems, and the improvement of the institutional environment for innovation. In the process of overall advancement, we must firmly grasp two keys.
From the perspective of work priorities, we must stick closely to the focal point of the deep integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation. On one hand, the evolution of previous technological revolutions and industrial transformations generally presented a linear progression from technological innovation to the transformation of results and then to industrial innovation; however, the evolution of the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation presents different characteristics—industrial innovation may even move ahead of technological innovation and gradually become an important force driving it. Technological and industrial innovation increasingly show a trend of integration and synchronization. On the other hand, looking at our country’s actual development, although significant progress has been made, due to constraints such as institutional mechanisms, the integration and correlation between technological and industrial innovation remain relatively weak. The "two skins" [4] phenomenon still exists to varying degrees, affecting the utilization and allocation efficiency of innovation factors, delaying the innovation process, and hindering the rapid cultivation of new kinetic energy. Therefore, in the process of cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy, we must focus on the key of deep integration, working both to break down institutional and mechanism barriers—effectively solving the "decoupling" problem between the innovation chain and the industrial chain—and to systematically optimize mechanisms for resource allocation, industry-university-research collaboration, and industrial layout, fully opening the channels for transformation from technological strength to industrial and economic strength.
From the perspective of work methods, we must persist in acting according to local conditions (因地制宜, yīn dì zhì yí) [5], basing the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy on existing foundations. Intensifying the cultivation and expansion of new kinetic energy is an important task deployed by the Central Committee; in the process of implementation, we must persist in the methodology of acting according to local conditions. On one hand, persisting in starting from reality in all things is the starting point and foothold for how we think about problems, make decisions, and conduct affairs; it is an important method for doing all work well. This requires both grasping the universal laws of the development of things and basing ourselves on reality to achieve a concrete analysis of concrete problems. On the other hand, cultivating and expanding new kinetic energy through innovation-driven development is a new subject for which mature experience and fixed models have not yet been formed. This inherently requires all localities to act according to local conditions and time, actively and initiatively exploring developmental paths that suit their own realities. After the Central Committee has clarified the direction and deployment, all localities should combine their own levels of development, basic conditions, and actual situations to implement category-based policies and take active measures in innovation priorities and industrial layouts. By carrying out differentiated explorations, they will gradually form distinctive, vibrant, and sustainable models for cultivating new kinetic energy in practice.