Local colleges and universities are the main body of national higher education, the main undertakers and executors of promoting connotation construction and on a long-term basis, making China a powerful country by building an advanced system of higher education. Connotative development is a kind of development mode which differs from the scale development. Merely from the understanding of the concept, the composition of connotative development should include all the factors that affect the function of the local institutions, consisting of elements with regard to its goal, function, subject, object and governance, as well as the base level and promotion level of the constituent elements, all of which are integrated by knowledge processing. The basic elements of connotative development possess the characteristics of objective existence, knowledge-acquisition process, implicitness and explicitness of behavioral consequence, and input-output complexity. Local colleges and universities should grasp the essence of connotative development accurately with the viewpoint of system, contradiction and appropriate value, highlight their position and function as the subject elements, spot the key problems and main phases, so as to avoid the superficiality, formality, and quantity without quality of the connotation construction, thus improving the constructing effect.