Abstract: Since universities serve as the most important organizational carriers for implementing higher education, it is necessary, for better playing the leading role of higher education in serving the strategic goals of high-quality development, based on history, starting from the present and facing the future, to summarize the experience of systematic and qualitative changes in university organizations and discover the operative patterns, thus predicting the development trends. Under the perspective of Complex Adaptive System, the transformation of the nature and functions of universities, disciplinary organizational structure, and talent cultivation models, the three interrelated key subsystems, is thus systematic. Since the Middle Ages, there have been four times of such systematic changes and transformations. In the new era, universities should be constructed with innovative concepts, thus achieving the organic integration of talent cultivation, technological innovation, and social services; the knowledge system of segmentation should be integrated and the organizational structure of discipline based on network constructed; a community of virtual and real education should be built, thus forming a talent training model based on multi-subject collaboration.

Key words: university organizations, organizational transformation, innovation-oriented universities, talent training mode