Collaborative Innovation Models for Application-Oriented Maritime Undergraduate Colleges Under the Background of Building a Maritime Power

Building a maritime power is a talent problem before it is a technology problem, and application-oriented maritime undergraduate colleges sit where the two meet. Their inherited teaching models, though, were designed for a shipping industry that no longer exists, and the distance between what they produce and what the blue economy needs has widened under digital transformation. This paper asks what collaborative innovation actually looks like inside such institutions, and whether the multi-stakeholder arrangements now promoted in Chinese policy close that distance. The study is qualitative. It works through the Triple Helix and Quadruple Helix literatures, reads the relevant policy texts, and then examines three Chinese institutions in detail (Jimei University, Dalian Maritime University, and Jiangsu University of Science and Technology). Four arrangements recur across the cases: government-university-industry-research synergies, industry-education integration platforms, project-based training mechanisms, and ecosystems built around digital intelligence. Where these are in place, graduates match employer requirements more closely and maritime technologies reach commercial use faster. Cross-sector partnership needs institutionalizing rather than improvising, and digital infrastructure should be treated as shared equipment rather than as a departmental purchase. Without both, maritime higher education will go on describing itself as a servant of national strategy while lagging behind it.