进入21世纪，人类社会逐渐迈入知识经济社会。知识、科技、教育在社会经济中的战略地位日益显现。高等教育从社会的边缘走向社会的轴心，成为国家和民族决胜未来的主要因素之一。中国高等教育全面走向开放，同时从精英高等教育向高等教育大众化转变，各方面矛盾突出，迫切需要高等教育创新。随着各种创新的复合术语在国内广泛使用，高等教育创新迅速成为社会的热点话题，其概念在学术界和管理当局被越来越频繁地提及。但是高等教育创新的研究刚刚起步，目前还没有形成成熟的研究范式，观点零散。 本文对高等教育创新领域的研究文献进行了详细综述，结合前人的研究成果提出高等教育创新的概念。高等教育创新是将高等教育的新思想或新理论等因素发展成为有用并得到社会承认的成果的一系列活动组合的复杂过程，其本质是“一系列创新要素构成的集成创新”，具有集成性、复杂性、系统性等特征，并从高等教育创新对象的角度将高等教育创新的内容归纳为高等教育观念创新、体制创新、过程创新和高等教育知识创新。在此基础上，着重对高等教育创新的动力机制进行了研究。分析了高等教育创新的各种动力要素，并将其分为内动力和外动力两类，探讨了各种动力要素的相关关系以及对高等教育创新的作用方式，构建了高等教育创新动力机制模型和高等教育创新动力机制的分析模式。最后运用模糊评价方法构建了高等教育创新动力的综合评价模型。运用评价模型对西安科技大学的高等教育创新动力进行评价分析，得出西安科技大学的创新动力较弱，特别是创新能力不强，没有形成强大的高等教育创新的动力机制的结论。

Entering 21st centuries, social development speed becomes unprecedented quickly, and the human society will stride forward the knowledge-based economy gradually. The strategy position and role of knowledge, technology and education is being showed increasingly in the social economy. The higher education tends towards the axes of society from the society’s edge, and becomes one of the main factors that the nation get in on the ground floor in the future competition with other nations. Now, the Chinese higher education throws open completely and changes into mass higher education from the essence higher education at the same time. So higher education get into a hobble, urgently needs the higher education innovation. With the complex terms of innovation being used widely in china, the higher education innovation becomes one of the focus topics quickly. The concept is mentioned more and more frequently by academia and administering authority. But the research on higher education innovation just starts still would not have come into being the mature canonical form. So, the viewpoint of scholars is scattered and the systemic theory doesn’t exist. In this paper, the literature about higher education innovation is summarized and overviewed detailed and completely. The concept of higher education innovation is offered on basis of the predecessors’ research findings. The higher education innovation is a series complex process that the factors such as new idea and new theory about higher education are grown to be the useful and approbated results. The essence of it is the integrated innovation composed by a series of innovative factors. It has the main character such as integrating complexity and systematicness. From the innovating object, higher education innovation can be concluded into innovation of higher education idea, innovation of higher education system, innovation of higher education process and knowledge innovation in higher education. On this basic, the motivational mechanism of higher education innovation has been studied emphasized. Kinds of motive factors of higher education innovation have been analyzed and divided into inner motive and exterior motive. Their correlativity and function to higher education innovation have been research. By the analysis, the motivational mechanism model of higher education innovation has been set up, and the analysis mode of it has also been founded. Finally the synthesize estimate model has been set up and applied to analyze XUST. The conclusion has been get that the innovation motive of it is weak and motivational mechanism has not formed.