In the first eight months of this year, fixed asset investment nationwide declined 7.2% year on year, yet investment in intellectual property products delivered an impressive 9.2% increase, accounting for 15.2% of total investment, up 2.3 percentage points from the same period last year.

Intellectual property product investment has become an important force stabilizing investment, reflecting the trend of China's economy moving toward new and higher-quality development and its shifting growth drivers.

For a long time, tangible investment such as traditional infrastructure and real estate served as the mainstay supporting investment growth.

Now, investment in intellectual property products 鈥?directed toward intellectual achievements and intangible assets 鈥?is rapidly filling the gap.

Data shows that during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, nationwide investment in intellectual property products totaled approximately 30 trillion yuan, accounting for 12.4% of all investment, with an average annual growth rate of 6.4%, 4 percentage points higher than total investment.

In the first eight months of this year, investment in computer software and databases grew 10.9%, and research and development investment grew 7.8%, together accounting for more than 95% of intellectual property product investment.

The structural shift toward ever-greater "intangible input" reflects a gradual adjustment in investment logic: enterprises no longer rely solely on scale expansion and factor stacking to generate returns, but increasingly turn to building long-term competitiveness through technological barriers, data assets, and intellectual property systems.

This also aligns with the direction charted by the 15th Five-Year Plan outline: adapting to the requirements of developing new quality productive forces and actively supporting investment in new infrastructure and intangible assets.

This change has already become embedded to varying degrees in real industrial landscapes: industrial enterprises are advancing intelligent transformation and digital upgrading on a large scale, with procurement spending on industrial software and industrial internet platforms continuing to increase.

Statistics show that by the end of 2025, nearly 90% of industrial enterprises above designated size had carried out digital transformation, and the numerical control rate of key processes in enterprises in key industries reached 68.6%.

Leading enterprises in frontier fields such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, biomedicine, and high-end materials generally have R&D investment intensity far exceeding the industry average.

The full-chain layout of the computing power industry, from underlying hardware to upper-layer algorithms, is also continuously generating large amounts of new investment in intellectual property.

From "competing for projects and spreading resources" to "competing for R&D and prioritizing innovation," the continued rapid growth of intellectual property product investment is the result of both market endogenous momentum and innovation incentive policies working together.

For a long period in the past, many enterprises were "unwilling to invest in R&D and afraid to invest in long-term innovation," mainly because innovation investment was costly, had long cycles, and made outcomes difficult to monetize.

In recent years, a series of institutional arrangements 鈥?from tax incentives for high-tech enterprises and the continued expansion of super-deductions for R&D expenses, to the ongoing opening of channels for converting "intellectual property" into "assets" through intellectual property pledge financing, to reforms granting rights to scientific and technological achievements that spur the innovation enthusiasm of researchers and enterprises 鈥?have helped enterprises lower innovation costs and share trial-and-error risks, making them willing and able to invest in innovation.

At the same time, factors such as the acceleration of domestic substitution and rising demand in the chip market have also provided strong traction for intellectual property product investment.

Some argue that the rising share of intellectual property product investment is merely a "trade-off" against the backdrop of declining traditional investment growth and is unlikely to form long-term stable growth momentum.

It should be acknowledged that structural factors have indeed played a role, but the 9.2% growth in intellectual property product investment in the first eight months of this year, which drove a 1.2 percentage point increase in total investment, shows that its own increment and support for investment are equally evident.

More importantly, from an internationally comparable perspective, once an economy enters a mature stage of innovation-driven development, a sustained rise in intangible asset investment as a share of GDP is a common trend.

The 2025 World Intangible Investment Report shows that in 2024, intangible asset investment as a share of GDP across 27 middle- and high-income economies worldwide rose to nearly 14%.

The rapid growth of China's intellectual property product investment is essentially about building solid underlying assets for the development of new quality productive forces. Funds invested today in R&D, software, and data will translate into higher production efficiency, broader industrial tracks, and stronger international competitiveness in the future.

Take the new energy vehicle industry as an example. Over the past decade, the entire industry has continuously directed substantial resources toward core technology breakthroughs in the three electric systems and iterative development of intelligent driving algorithms. These intangible investments have now been transformed into the comparative advantages of Chinese automakers in the global market.

It should also be noted that intellectual property product investment is still in a rapid growth stage, and there are still many shortcomings to address.

For example, there is a lack of unified standards for intellectual property value assessment, the asset-light nature of many small and medium-sized innovative enterprises still struggles to fit the traditional credit system, and the efficiency of converting scientific research achievements in many universities and research institutes still has room for improvement.

In the future, by further opening up the positive cycle of "input 鈥?transformation 鈥?returns 鈥?reinvestment" and enabling more enterprises to direct more resources toward innovation, intellectual property product investment is fully capable of maintaining relatively rapid growth and becoming a key lever for stabilizing investment, optimizing structure, and strengthening growth drivers.