On October 21, the 2023 Ningbo Fashion Festival, themed on “Tide Surging in the Orient, Fashion Going in Ningbo”, and the 27th Ningbo International Fashion Festival came to a successful conclusion. The Faculty of Design, Art and Architecture and the Sino-German Department of Branding of ZWU were invited to exhibit the achievements in their school-enterprise cooperation projects with those leading enterprises such as Guangbo Group and Hape Holdings AG (Ningbo).
The Ningbo Fashion Festival lasted from October 19 to 21 at Ningbo International Convention and Exhibition Center. The exhibition booth of ZWU, “Light of Youth”, has showcased the product IPs, brand peripherals, marketing posters, and theme scene interactive devices that were creatively designed and produced for the two enterprises by the students from ZWU, comprehensively presenting the works of new media visual communication design and the excellent creative achievements made in industry-education integration. During the exhibition, our school’s achievements in the integration between industry and education received high praise from all sectors of society. The booth was visited by a steady stream of visitors, making “Light of Youth” one of the most popular spots at the Ningbo Fashion Festival.
The exhibition was closely followed and reported by media outlets such as China Education Daily and China Daily, reaching a readership of over one million. The industry-education integration exhibition booth of ZWU, “Light of Youth”, was awarded the “Fashion School-Enterprise Cooperation Contribution Award” and the “Best Popularity Award” by the organizer.
On the morning of October 19, a group of leaders, including Peng Jiaxue, member of the Standing Committee of Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee and secretary of Ningbo Municipal Party Committee, Tang Feifan, deputy secretary of Ningbo Municipal Party Committee and vice mayor of Ningbo Municipality, and Li Qiang, deputy director of the Consumer Products Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, visited our exhibition booth. Yang Zhenfeng, vice president of ZWU, and leaders from the Faculty of Design, Art and Architecture and the Sino-German Department Branding, introduced our achievements to the city leaders. Peng Jiaxue spoke highly of the education model of school-enterprise cooperation and hoped that Zhejiang Wanli University will continue to cooperate with local enterprises, thus jointly promoting new fashion trends in Ningbo.
During the exhibition, Guangbo Group and ZWU jointly unveiled the co-created IP image MIMO. Students from the Faculty of Design, Art and Architecture and the Sino-German Department Branding moved their classrooms to the exhibition site. Centering around the themes of “Fashion Goes Beyond Life”, “Effectiveness of Industry-Education Integration Exhibition” and “Looking to the Future through Design”, Chinese and foreign teachers guided students to do some research and helped them understand the great significance of industry-education integration education model. Besides, a salon was held in the interactive area of the exhibition booth, where quite a few emerging designers shared their visions on the above-mentioned themes in real time. With rich achievements made in the integration between industry and education, ZWU has fully interpreted the theme of the Fashion Festival: “Tide Surging in the Orient, Fashion Going in Ningbo”. ZWU will continue to cooperate with those leading enterprises at home and abroad, deepen the teaching mechanism of the integration between industry and education and grow towards “fashion”, contributing to the economic development and brand building of Ningbo.
For many years, ZWU has implemented the national strategic deployment on deepening the integration between industry and education, closely adhered to the goal of cultivating high-quality application-oriented talents, and actively served the national cross-border E-commerce comprehensive trial zone, national intellectual property protection demonstration zone, and international port and shipping logistics hub cities. With deepening industry-education integration and school-enterprise cooperation as a good opportunity, ZWU has innovated school-enterprise collaborative education mechanism, constructed a school-enterprise collaborative education model, and built a school-enterprise collaborative education platform. At present, ZWU has established 16 school-level industry colleges (among which 2 are at the provincial level and 5 at the municipal level), presenting an industry-education integration pattern known as “one school with one industry college serving one industrial chain”, and actively exploring an international, open, and application-oriented education path.
Looking to the future, ZWU will continue to promote its connotation construction, improve its teaching quality, actively promote talent cultivation through the integration between industry and education, consistently innovate and explore new models of school-enterprise cooperation, better serve local economic development, and cultivate more diversified cross-cultural professional talents for the transformation from “Made in China” to “Chinese Brand”.