The breeding of rural tourism professionals is a multi-faceted and organized process. The clarification of the hierarchical relationships between the influencing factors and the identification of the main components are critical to enhance the efficiency of talent cultivation in rural tourism. In this paper, the DEMATEL approach is used to find out the degree of centrality and causality and thus identifying the significant factors that influence the study. The system dynamic view constructs, simulates, and analyzes a talent cultivation model of collaborative innovation between industry, universities, and research institutions. Moreover, a novel way of developing rural tourism talent is suggested by combining the concept of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis with the direction of developing high-quality rural tourism talent. It was found that there were eight direct influencing factors, i.e., time demand and national policy support, and twelve indirect factors, i.e., rural tourism attitude and rural tourism platform construction. During the cultivation process, the factors associated with industry-university-research cooperation are highly interdependent and interconnected, creating a tightly-knit decision-making network. Colleges and universities do not directly contribute to the talent cultivation through industry-university-research cooperation, whereas the role of enterprise capital input and research institution participation is significant in ensuring the successful implementation of the collaborative innovation process to develop talents in rural tourism. The cultivation path can also be divided into three groups which are the talent-resource-environment group, comprehensive-focus group and the talent-resource dual-focus group.
