Research on the Operating Mechanism of Industry-Education Integration Communities from the Perspective of Collaborative Innovation of the “Three Educations”

Abstract

With the deepening of industry-education integration, industry-education integration communities have gradually become an important organizational form for connecting vocational education with industrial development. However, the effectiveness of such communities depends not only on whether schools and enterprises establish formal cooperation, but also on whether teachers, teaching materials, and teaching methods can be jointly developed and continuously innovated. From the perspective of collaborative innovation of the “Three Educations”—teachers, teaching materials, and teaching methods—this paper analyzes the operating mechanism of industry-education integration communities. Drawing on the Triple Helix perspective and the literature on university-industry collaboration, the paper argues that the community should be understood as a networked governance arrangement in which vocational colleges, enterprises, and other relevant actors jointly participate in value creation. On this basis, a four-stage operating mechanism is proposed: joint goal formation, resource integration, process co-creation, and outcome feedback. The collaborative innovation of teachers constitutes the actor foundation, the collaborative development of teaching materials constitutes the knowledge and content carrier, and the collaborative innovation of teaching methods constitutes the process realization mechanism. These three dimensions interact through communication, trust, shared governance, knowledge transfer, and feedback, forming a self-reinforcing cycle of “joint participation–knowledge integration–teaching innovation–performance feedback”. The study contributes a process-oriented framework for understanding how industry-education integration communities operate and provides practical implications for improving their governance and sustainability.