Developing College Students’ Innovation Capability: A System Dynamics Perspective

Universities increasingly seek to develop students’ innovation capability, but growth in student participation and project activity can outpace the mentoring, facilities, funding, and incubation capacity required to sustain it. This study examines the dynamic alignment between capability-related student conditions and institutional support capacity. A four-subsystem system dynamics model represents Student Motivation, Student Self-Efficacy, Innovation Skills, project flows, Campus Resources, Mentor Pool, Policy Support, and Innovation Output. The model is used to trace feedback, accumulation, capacity constraints, and implementation delays and to conduct counterfactual policy experiments over 240 months. Policy configurations are evaluated from the complete simulated trajectories by calculating the area under the curve (AUC) for Innovation Output, Student Motivation, and Campus Resources and applying Pareto dominance. The simulations show that strong incentives or rapid project expansion can generate short-term gains while increasing congestion, resource pressure, and burnout when institutional capacity adjusts too slowly. Eight configurations are non-dominated, indicating that no single policy simultaneously maximizes cumulative output, preserves motivation, and protects the resource base. The results are conditional on the stated model structure, parameterization, and single-institution calibration; they are intended to support policy deliberation rather than establish causal effects or make point predictions.