On August 21, four departments including the Department of Industry and Information Technology of Shandong Province issued a notice on the Special Action Plan for Empowering SMEs with Sci-tech Achievements in Shandong Province (2023-2025). By 2025, Shandong strives to collect and release more than 2,000 new technologies and products by SMEs and more than 1,000 innovative achievements by universities and institutes and promote the application and transformation of a batch of advanced and applicable sci-tech achievements in SMEs.

As per the document, Shandong will implement ten major actions to effectively empower SMEs with sci-tech achievements and enhance their core competitiveness. Specifically, the ten major actions are "innovation platform empowerment, industry-university-research collaborative innovation, new technology and product promotion, coordinated development of large-, medium-, and small-sized enterprises, promotion of high-quality intellectual properties of SMEs, robot empowerment, artificial intelligence empowerment, industrial Internet empowerment, virtual reality empowerment, and data empowerment."

Meanwhile, focusing on 11 representative industrial chains, Shandong will carry out new technology and product promotion activities and encourage large enterprises to lead by example in using the innovative products of SMEs; help more specialized and sophisticated SMEs become the best "partners" of large enterprises; hold more than 10 provincial-level supply-demand matchmaking activities for integrating and strengthening key industrial chains and more than 50 municipal-level supply-demand matchmaking activities for integrating and strengthening industrial chains every year.