The plan makes clear arrangements for the industrial internet, and the government work report has called for its development for four consecutive years. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology resolutely implements the decisions and deployments of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, and, together with relevant departments, issued the "Industrial Internet Innovation and Development Action Plan (2021-2023)," clarifying the development goals and key tasks for the industrial internet over the next three years. To better understand the situation of the industrial internet, the Industrial Internet Industry Alliance has organized the industry to systematically compile relevant content and launched a series of popular science Q&A columns on the industrial internet.
Why develop the "Industrial Internet"?
In recent years, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation has developed rapidly. The Internet has extended rapidly from the consumer sector to the production sector, and the industrial economy has expanded deeply from digitalization to networking and intelligence. The innovative development of the Internet and the new industrial revolution have formed a historic convergence, giving rise to the Industrial Internet.
Accelerating the development of the industrial internet and promoting the deep integration of new-generation information technology with manufacturing is in line with the trend of technological and industrial transformation, a key lever for accelerating the construction of a manufacturing powerhouse and a cyber powerhouse, a way to deepen supply-side structural reform and promote the transformation and upgrading of the real economy, and an objective requirement for achieving the goal of "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality" and continuously promoting sustainable development.
From the perspective of industrial economic development, the Industrial Internet provides crucial support for building a manufacturing powerhouse. First, it promotes the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries. Through comprehensive interconnection across equipment, systems, factories, and regions, it enables the optimized allocation of various production and service resources on a larger scale, with higher efficiency, and with greater precision. This achieves improved quality, reduced costs, increased efficiency, green development, and safe operation, driving the high-end, intelligent, and green development of manufacturing and significantly enhancing the quality and efficiency of industrial economic development. Second, it accelerates the cultivation and expansion of emerging industries. The Industrial Internet promotes the evolution of design, production, management, and service processes from single-point digitalization to comprehensive integration, accelerating profound changes in innovation methods, production models, organizational forms, and business models. This fosters numerous new models, new business forms, and new industries, such as platform-based design, intelligent manufacturing, networked collaboration, personalized customization, service extension, and digital management.
From the perspective of network infrastructure development, the Industrial Internet is a crucial component of building a cyber power. First, it accelerates network evolution and upgrading. The Industrial Internet promotes the comprehensive interconnection of people, machines, things, and systems from the public internet (connecting people to people) and the Internet of Things (IoT) (connecting things to things), significantly enhancing the support and service capabilities of network infrastructure. Second, it expands the digital economy space. The Industrial Internet has strong penetrability, enabling deep integration with various sectors of the real economy, such as transportation, logistics, energy, healthcare, and agriculture. It achieves extensive interconnection across upstream and downstream industries and across sectors, driving the scientific leap of network applications from virtual to physical, and from daily life to production, greatly expanding the development space of the network economy.
