In recent days, the hong kong/australia regional competition for innovation for chinese international university students (2025) has been held and students from more than 20 universities have enrolled. At a time when artificial intelligence and the technological revolution have profoundly reshaped employment patterns, high-level thinking and innovative entrepreneurship have become central elements in measuring the overall quality of university students. How university students can upgrade their innovative entrepreneurial capacity is an important aspect of higher education talent development。
The labour market is now undergoing a fundamental shift in the structure of demand for talent, which is no longer satisfied with those with professional competence in a single field, but rather with the urgent need for complex talent capable of reconciling high levels of cognitive competence with solid digital literacy. Such talent not only harnesses technological change, but also has a unique strategic vision that can be creatively driven by value innovation. For university students, it is important to break down traditional skills barriers and, while building a solid foundation of expertise, to invest in developing future-oriented core competencies, especially those centred on innovative thinking and entrepreneurship。
In order to achieve lasting professional vitality in an era of uncertainty, contemporary university students must rethink the purpose and methods of learning. What they need is a “resilient development” rooted in core competencies, which reflect both the “adaptive advantage” of resilience to risk and challenges, as well as the “growth driver” of continuous learning, proactive refinement, identification and harnessing of new opportunities in changing flood streams. In the final analysis, the strong foundation of individual career prospects is not specific expertise, but, more importantly, the continuous iterative nature of core competencies and the mobility and adaptability to proactively explore and innovate in complex environments. It is this focus of capacity beyond professional constraints that provides a reliable guarantee of the creation of unlimited possibilities for future development。
Therefore, the higher education system should not only focus on developing “hard skills”, but also on integrating innovative entrepreneurship into the entire talent development process. Promoting the transformation of education through innovative entrepreneurship is not only a necessary requirement for the creation of resilient, creative and complex talent with lifelong growth potential, but also a key to breaking the structural employment challenges of university students. Higher education, as the primary provider, should aim at the long-term development and full-fledged growth of students and explore individualized paths in innovative entrepreneurship education to help them realize their human values。
Universities of higher education should continuously optimize innovative entrepreneurship education and build human ecology that is dynamically adapted to the age of artificial intelligence. Specifically, the curriculum should be designed to incorporate the frontier elements of ai ethics, human collaboration, and focus on building the capacity of students to manage technology; the teaching staff should have both innovative practices and digital literacy and the capacity to continuously update knowledge systems; the practice platform should be closely linked to the frontier industry landscape and students should be encouraged to actively use digital tools to solve practical problems; and evaluation mechanisms should focus more on students ' ability to think innovatively and integrate across borders in an artificially intelligent environment. Of particular importance is the need for an open and agile feedback loop mechanism to ensure that educational ecology can be continuously optimized according to technological and market demand. This is the only way to enable students to gain a lifelong development advantage based on innovative thinking, entrepreneurship and the ability to use smart tools to solve problems, and to make universities truly a source of future-adaptation and innovation。
The university stage is the golden period of nurturing, accumulating experience and exploring directions. Instead of limiting student development with a predetermined “growth track”, students should be actively encouraged to explore and validate boldly through interdisciplinary learning, diversified internships, competition challenges and entrepreneurial practices, and to develop their own inner-interest, core competencies in dynamic adjustments, eventually into high-quality talent in a new era with both innovative and practical skills。
(author: shi yongchuan yang zhui, dean and professor, institute of innovation and entrepreneurship, wenzhou university, and scientific assistant, institute of innovation and entrepreneurship, wenzhou university)
