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TopDue to the importance of innovative talent cultivation, extensive research has been done on improving ITCCHE in various aspects. Dai et al. (2023) and Michel-Villarreal et al. (2023) focus on how to apply generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools effectively and efficiently, (e.g., ChatGPT) on student-driven innovation, to enhance students’ ability as well as their educational experiences and resources. Børte et al. (2020) identify prerequisites of student active learning by reviewing related articles. Alt et al. (2023) studies the benefits of future problem-solving for students’ creativity and innovation. These works ignore the ITCCHE assessment that is the cornerstone for their applications.
There are many works that focus on the ITCCHE assessment to provide reference and basis for continuous improvement. Li et al. (2023) presents a case study of innovation and entrepreneurship experiences by the ecosystem idea. They analyze the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem of a Chinese university in four aspects: organizational communities, population relations, environmental elements, and governance mechanisms. Chen (2022) analyzes how to use blended teaching methods to improve innovative talents. They emphasize clarifying the major objectives, focusing on comprehensive ability cultivation, improving the assessment system, and constructing assessment indicators for blended teaching, but this work does not present measures to implement their propositions. Similarly, Lu and Mei (2022) list several ways to improve traditional education for a better ITCCHE. These works only focus on how to design or implement the cultivation of innovative and entrepreneurial talents but do not study quantitative assessment of ITCCHE. By only these works, it is difficult for higher education schools to find causes of poor implementation of cultivation methods, leading to unsustainability of their methods.
Students are objects of innovative talent cultivation in higher education schools; therefore, some works study assessing innovative abilities of students. Yang and Zhou (2018) list several indicators that can be used to assess students' innovation and entrepreneurship abilities but do not give the assessing method. Li et al. (2022) surveyed 498 students by questionnaire and discuss factors influencing innovation abilities of undergraduate students majoring in economics. This work is based on students’ subjective data entirely and only considers three basic skill indicators, four innovation consciousness indicators, and three innovation ability indicators, leading to limitations of its used scheme and obtained conclusions. In order to accurately evaluate students' innovation and entrepreneurship abilities, Wang et al. (2022) first built an indicator system for assessing innovation and entrepreneurship abilities of students by in-depth interview, which included 18 indicators in four aspects: student background, professional skill, practical ability, and expanding ability. Then, they collected valid information of 1773 students by questionnaire and established a nonlinear assessing model through a backpropagation neural network.
Teachers are the main implementers of talent cultivation, so their teaching abilities greatly affect the innovative abilities of the students they cultivate (Chakraborty & Biswas, 2020). Therefore, Ismayilova and Laksov (2022) focus on analyzing influencing factors on teachers' perception of creative teaching. Through researching 14 university teachers, the literature argues that influencing factors include both teachers' characteristics and the supportive environment provided by the faculty.
Some works have been done to analyze or assess the innovative capacity of higher education schools. Abibo et al. (2022) utilizes panel data analytical frames to analyze the main factors affecting innovation capacity. Their data is collected from 24 Ethiopian public universities, including 10 categories of outcomes, such as patent, publication, and research funding. Based on analyzed results, they recommend improving the innovation capacity and research outcomes of Ethiopian public universities by increasing research budgets, strengthening international cooperation, and expanding the enrollment of PhDs.