In the first eight months of this year, fixed asset investment nationwide fell 7.2% year on year, yet investment in intellectual property products delivered a standout result with growth of 9.2%, accounting for 15.2% of all investment, up 2.3 percentage points from the same period last year.

This makes intellectual property product investment an important force for stabilizing investment and reflects the trend of China's economy moving toward new and better growth and shifting its growth drivers.

For a long time, tangible investment such as traditional infrastructure and real estate was the main force supporting investment growth. Now, investment in intellectual property products, which is directed at intellectual achievements and intangible assets, is rapidly filling the gap. Data show that during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, nationwide investment in intellectual property products totaled about 30 trillion yuan, accounting for 12.4% of all investment and growing at an average annual rate of 6.4%, 4 percentage points higher than the average annual growth rate of all investment. In the first eight months of this year, investment in computer software and databases rose 10.9%, and investment in research and development rose 7.8%, with the two together accounting for more than 95% of investment in intellectual property products. The structural change of continuously increasing "intangible input" reflects a gradual adjustment in the logic of investment: enterprises no longer rely solely on scale expansion and the piling up of factors to obtain returns, but are turning more toward building long-term competitiveness through technological barriers, data assets, and intellectual property systems. This also follows the direction set out in 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. Such changes have already been embedded to varying degrees in the real industrial landscape: industrial enterprises are advancing intelligent upgrading and digital transformation on a large scale, and purchases of industrial software, industrial internet platforms, and other inputs continue to increase. According to statistics, 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 above the industry average. The full-chain layout of the computing power industry, from underlying hardware to upper-layer algorithms, is also continuously generating a large amount of new intellectual property-related investment.

From "competing on projects and spreading out stalls" to "competing on R&D and emphasizing innovation," the continued rapid growth of intellectual property product investment is the result of both market internal 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 is costly, has a long cycle, and is difficult to monetize. In recent years, a series of institutional arrangements have helped enterprises lower innovation costs and share the risks of trial and error, making them willing to invest in and daring to invest in innovation: from tax incentives for high-tech enterprises and the continued expansion of the policy of additional deduction for R&D expenses, to the continuous opening of channels for transforming "intellectual property" into "assets" through intellectual property pledge financing, and to reforms granting ownership of scientific and technological achievements that have stimulated the enthusiasm of researchers and enterprises for 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 views hold that the rising share of intellectual property product investment is merely a "shift of one thing replacing another" against the backdrop of slowing traditional investment growth and that it is difficult for this to form a long-term stable growth driver. It should be acknowledged that structural factors have indeed played a role, but the fact that intellectual property product investment grew 9.2% in the first eight months of this year and contributed 1.2 percentage points to overall investment growth shows that its own increment and its support for investment are equally obvious. More importantly, from an internationally comparable perspective, after 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 in 27 middle- and high-income economies worldwide had risen to nearly 14%. The rapid growth of China's intellectual property product investment is essentially building underlying assets for the development of new quality productive forces. Funds invested today in R&D, software, and data will in the future be transformed into higher production efficiency, broader industrial tracks, and stronger international competitiveness. Take the new energy vehicle industry as an example. Over the past 10 years, the entire industry has continuously devoted large amounts of resources to tackling core technologies in the three electric systems, iterating intelligent driving algorithms, and other fields. These intangible inputs 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 stage of rapid growth, and there are still many shortcomings to be addressed. For example, there is a lack of unified standards for intellectual property value assessment, the asset-light nature of many small, medium, and micro innovative enterprises is still difficult to match with the traditional credit system, and the efficiency of transforming 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—transformation—returns—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 increasing momentum.