Shenzhen has introduced a series of measures to tackle the challenges within its "20+8" industrial clusters, which include strengthening diversified mechanisms for resolving intellectual property disputes, developing a comprehensive mediation system for IP conflicts, and enhancing services for handling overseas IP-related disagreements. These efforts are part of the city's broader strategy to establish itself as a national model for IP reform and innovation.
Open licensed patents have been collectively made available online. Rooted in its strategic role within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and the pilot demonstration zone for socialism with Chinese characteristics, Shenzhen has enacted the "Implementation Plan for Optimizing the Business Environment in the Intellectual Property Field" (the "Implementation Plan"). Since its introduction, various reform tasks have been steadily advanced, with the pilot program already yielding significant early results.
Anchoring Core Objectives to Build a High-Quality Development System
The Implementation Plan targets the creation of a market-oriented, law-based, and international business environment for IP, with a specific focus on Shenzhen-Hong Kong collaboration. It establishes a comprehensive work system covering factor activation, stringent protection, service upgrades, and cross-border coordination, providing full-chain support for all types of innovation entities. Furthermore, Shenzhen highlights its "one city, one policy" approach, concentrating on the pain points within its "20+8" industrial clusters. This involves improving the multi-faceted IP dispute resolution mechanism, building a three-dimensional mediation framework, and refining services for foreign-related IP disputes, all geared towards forging a distinctive Shenzhen model for IP reform and innovation.
The Plan closely follows the core principles of "international excellence" and "Shenzhen-Hong Kong synergy," structuring a development target system with clear levels and precise direction. It seeks to establish an efficient market-oriented operating mechanism, deepen empowerment reforms, and strengthen financial innovation to overcome bottlenecks in科技成果 commercialization, smooth the path for IP value realization, and promote IP as a core asset driving innovative development.
A legal guarantee system is being established to support comprehensive innovation. Targeting new fields and business forms such as 6G, biomanufacturing, and embodied intelligence, the city is improving its full-chain IP protection rules to provide stable, standardized, and reliable legal backing for innovators. An international IP service system is also being developed to address the needs of companies expanding overseas, offering a comprehensive service process covering risk warnings, dispute response, and rights protection to help them enhance their competitiveness in international markets.
A smart and convenient public service ecosystem is under construction, using digital transformation to advance government services towards "better, easier, and smarter" handling, thereby continuously reducing innovation costs across society. To build a collaborative innovation highland with Hong Kong, Shenzhen will leverage cooperation platforms like Qianhai and the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone to deepen cross-border rule alignment and resource flow, jointly building an IP development ecosystem that serves the nation's high-level opening-up strategy.
Deploying Innovative Measures to Tackle Key Priorities
The Implementation Plan outlines five key tasks, deploying reform and innovation measures that are both groundbreaking and exemplary. In improving the market-oriented IP mechanisms, efforts are driven by the dual cores of "activating factors" and "integrating the ecosystem."
First, "empowerment" is used to invigorate source innovation. This involves exploring the establishment of a negative list for the reform of ownership rights of job-related scientific and technological achievements, granting researchers long-term property rights or usage rights, and supporting this with a due diligence exemption mechanism to fundamentally ignite their intrinsic motivation for commercializing research results.
Second, "finance" is employed to streamline the transformation chain. Pilot programs for internal assessment of bank IP pledge financing are being innovatively implemented to resolve difficulties and high costs associated with valuation. The city encourages the development of financial products such as IP insurance and asset-backed securitization (ABS/ABN), establishes IP operation funds, and guides social capital towards "early-stage, small-scale, and hard-tech" investments, creating a financial support system for IP that covers the entire innovation lifecycle.
Third, "evaluation" is used to guide institutional behavior. Universities and research institutions are being encouraged to significantly increase the weight of patent implementation and commercialization indicators in performance appraisals, establishing a clear preference for "quality over quantity, and transformation over application." The Shenzhen Humanoid Robot and Embodied Intelligence IP and Standards Innovation Consortium has been officially established.
In strengthening legal protection for IP, the strategy combines "strict protection" with "innovative rules" on two fronts. One front involves forward-looking rule-making for emerging fields. Special IP protection research is being conducted in areas like artificial intelligence, generative AI, and the low-altitude economy, with industry guidelines issued promptly to clarify rules and safeguard the development of new productive forces. The other front focuses on streamlining rapid protection channels. The China (Shenzhen) IP Protection Center's pre-examination scope is being dynamically expanded to cover more strategic emerging industries, and AI technology is being explored to enhance the quality and efficiency of pre-examination, building a "fast track" for quick IP rights confirmation for innovation outcomes.
Furthermore, targeted measures are being implemented to purify the industry ecosystem. This includes deepening triggered supervision linked to campaigns against non-standard patent applications, establishing an industry "whitelist" mechanism that offers preferential services to high-quality applicants, and precisely targeting low-quality, non-compliant behavior to guide healthy and standardized industry development. In raising the internationalization level of IP services, the approach integrates "risk prevention" and "assistance support" on parallel tracks.
One track involves expanding the overseas service network, building upon the model of the German workstation to establish more overseas IP workstations in key trading countries and regions, creating service outposts close to overseas markets. Another track is the construction of a professional IP dispute response system, strengthening the Shenzhen work platform for national guidance on overseas IP disputes to provide enterprises with integrated "legal + technical" guidance across the entire dispute chain, and offering support to eligible rights holders in defending their interests.
Additionally, innovative risk-sharing mechanisms are being developed. This includes vigorously promoting overseas IP insurance and exploring the establishment of a rights protection assistance fund, using market-based methods to share the costs of overseas rights protection for enterprises, effectively equipping them with "protective armor" for going global. In advancing the facilitation of IP administrative services, the focus is on dual-speed acceleration through "intelligent empowerment" and "collaborative integration."
This involves pushing for "one-stop" business integration by exploring linked processing of enterprise business registration changes and trademark changes, organizing and integrating service items around the entire enterprise lifecycle, and building a "one-stop service platform for a category of matters." Services are also being enhanced through smart empowerment, using technologies like natural language processing large models to upgrade intelligent customer service and guidance systems, creating an "AI + IP" service framework that provides 7x24-hour professional consultation. Furthermore, data "sharing and collaboration" is being promoted by establishing a three-tier information service network at the municipal, district, and sub-district levels, along with thematic databases, to facilitate lawful and compliant sharing of IP data with scientific, technological, financial, and judicial data, providing data support for precise services and scientific decision-making.
Building a Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative International IP Highland
This initiative focuses on a dual-dimensional approach of "mechanism connectivity" and "resource aggregation." First, public services are being interconnected, deepening services like priority examination for Hong Kong and Macao applicants, exploring mutual establishment of IP inquiry points between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and advancing the alignment and integrated development of public service standards. Second, cross-border integration of the financial ecosystem is being promoted, exploring cross-border financing and securitization models based on IP, encouraging the development of financial products suited for Shenzhen-Hong Kong sci-tech innovation, and jointly building an IP financial ecosystem.
Third, the two cities are working together to create a "preferred destination" for dispute resolution. This involves strengthening judicial cooperation and law enforcement coordination, exploring mechanisms for cross-border recognition and enforcement of cases, and selecting technical personnel from Hong Kong and Macao to participate in case hearings. Leveraging the Qianhai and Hetao cooperation zones, the aim is to build an internationalized service industry cluster and a comprehensive IP protection highland, establishing diversified and international dispute resolution mechanisms.
Achieving Initial Success and Opening a New Chapter of Improved Quality and Efficiency
Since the implementation of the Plan, various reform pilots have been steadily rolled out with initial success achieved through collaborative efforts. New breakthroughs have been made in institutional innovation. Key institutional reforms, such as the empowerment reform for job-related scientific and technological achievements and internal evaluation for IP pledge financing, have been piloted in some universities and financial institutions. The innovative issuance of IP securitization products has been particularly effective, widely empowering tech-based SMEs.
Progress has also been made in establishing a data IP registration mechanism, launching the nation's first data IP registration platform and issuing the first batch of data IP registration certificates under the unified format of the China National Intellectual Property Administration. This promotes the effective confirmation, circulation, distribution, and governance of data elements. To date, a cumulative total of 2,395 certificates have been issued, 7,237 data attestations completed, with registered data volume reaching 27.231 billion records, covering key industries such as industrial manufacturing, agricultural technology, and artificial intelligence. The number of certificates issued, scale of registered data, and industrial coverage are among the highest nationally, contributing "Shenzhen experience" to building an IP governance system suitable for the digital age.
Service capabilities have seen systematic improvement. The International IP Academy, co-established by the China National Intellectual Property Administration and Peking University, has been established in Shenzhen, creating a platform for cultivating professional and international IP talent. The pre-examination efficiency at the Shenzhen IP Protection Center remains leading nationwide. The Shenzhen work platform for guiding overseas IP dispute response has seen a significant increase in consultation acceptance and case handling volume, building a solid legal barrier for enterprises going global. The "iShenzhen" IP service zone continues to be iteratively optimized, significantly enhancing the convenience of online services.
Furthermore, the Shenzhen Futian (Fashion Design) IP Rapid Rights Protection Center has been approved for construction and passed national acceptance, establishing a "one-stop" service system for rapid patent pre-examination, confirmation, and rights protection. This has drastically shortened the authorization cycle for design patents, marking key progress in Shenzhen's efforts to perfect its rapid IP collaborative protection network and bridge the "last mile" of IP protection services.
Significant innovations have been formed in legal safeguards. Shenzhen has pioneered the administrative protection model for Standard Essential Patents (SEP), creating a replicable and promotable practical example. On April 21st, the 2026 Shenzhen IP Publicity Week themed event and IP Joint Conference were held. During the handling of a SEP infringement dispute case, administrative mediation was lawfully conducted based on the principle of "combining adjudication and mediation, prioritizing mediation," organizing multiple rounds of high-level talks and working-level consultations, ultimately facilitating a mediation agreement between the parties. This established an SEP administrative adjudication mechanism that balances fairness and efficiency.
This mechanism not only legally regulates SEP implementation practices, effectively balancing the legitimate rights and interests of patent holders and standard implementers, but also maintains a fair and orderly market competition environment, providing solid legal safeguards for the high-quality development of Shenzhen's key industries. The protection ecosystem continues to improve. Societal awareness of respecting and protecting IP has significantly increased, and an atmosphere encouraging innovation and respecting IP is growing. High-value patents and well-known brands are emerging at an accelerated pace in Shenzhen, and enterprises' awareness and capability to use IP for international competition are continuously improving.
In 2025, Shenzhen's high-value invention patents per 10,000 people reached 119.70, PCT international patent applications have led the nation for 22 consecutive years, domestic patent grants have ranked first nationwide for 8 consecutive years, and trademark registrations have ranked first for 3 consecutive years. A total of 5 cases from Shenzhen were selected as national excellent cases for IP protection reform practices in key cities (regions), covering administrative protection, judicial protection, arbitration and mediation, and overseas protection. The number of selected cases ranks first among all cities nationwide, continuously empowering and fueling Shenzhen's high-quality development.
Looking ahead, Shenzhen will continue to uphold the pioneering "trial and error" spirit of the special economic zone, meticulously implement all reform measures, and strive to build itself into a global model innovative city known for vibrant IP creation, efficient utilization, robust protection, scientific management, high-quality services, and deep Shenzhen-Hong Kong integration. This will contribute "Shenzhen practice" and "Shenzhen wisdom" to the nation's efforts in building an IP power and optimizing the IP business environment.