APPLICATION TIMELINE
PROJECTS TYPES
- Project-Based Track: Students design and deliver service or social innovation projects that address specific community or organizational needs. The focus is on practical problem-solving, teamwork, and measurable impact through applied engagement.
- Community Leader Track: A Community Leader is a student who collaborates closely with local residents, organizations, and stakeholders to identify needs, co-design initiatives, and sustain long-term outcomes. Rather than providing one-time services, community leaders cultivate trust, mobilize resources, and facilitate solutions that empower and build communities’ resilience.
PROJECT INTRODUCTION
PEER
Country Studies
Project Information
This collaboration aims to engage DKU students in county-level field research together with PEER’s research team through a community exploration project. With mentorship and accompaniment from the PEER team, students will conduct on-site visits in county communities and use methods such as Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and oral history. They will conduct in-depth research on local humanities, social issues, and community development topics through field observation and interviews.
By researching local residents’ stories and understanding the realities of community life, students will gain solid hands-on field research experience and develop deeper insight into the context and root causes of social issues, building a practical foundation for future public action and social innovation.
Vidacity Shanghai
STAM Program Design
Project Information
Reactor School
SDG-related Consultation
Project Inforamation
Under professional guidance, participating students will conduct an in-depth research study on the start-up communities in Central China.
The research will examine the landscape and structure of local entrepreneurial ecosystems, including community characteristics, operational models, typical activities, stakeholder engagement, and emerging development trends. Students will explore how young entrepreneurs build networks, access resources, and develop early-stage ideas within these communities.
Through this project, students will gain hands-on experience in ecosystem mapping, community analysis, and qualitative interviewing, strengthening their understanding of China’s evolving innovation environment.
Impact Hub Shanghai
Shanghai Start-up Community Research
Project Inforamation
This project aims to provide students with authentic industry practice through university-corporate collaboration. Under the guidance of Impact Hub Shanghai, students will participate in a series of consulting-style research projects centered on climate, sustainability, renewable energy, and clean technology.
Typical working content includes stakeholder mapping, ecosystem mapping, innovation/technology assessment, and case research, helping students understand industry value chains, key stakeholder groups, and the interactions.
Between Feb 2026 and Jul 2026, possible research topics include (but are not limited to): financing support for county-level innovation and entrepreneurship, coordinated low-carbon transition across the petrochemical and chemical value chains (upstream to downstream).
Through the process, students will strengthen systems thinking and research capabilities, deepen their understanding of real-world operations in sustainable development and clean-tech sectors, and build a solid foundation for future career development in environment, energy, and social innovation.
WhaleSights
Going Global Research
Project Inforamation
“Going global” has become one of the hottest topics and top priorities for Chinese companies today. It may well be a defining keyword for China’s macroeconomy over the next decade—and a strategic decision facing every Chinese entrepreneur.
This project focuses on a specific outbound-expansion actor (e.g., a type of Chinese enterprise) or a target destination and ultimately aims to produce key insights into the current state of global expansion in a particular sub-sector and its core driving forces. By studying how Chinese companies expand into specific regions or countries (e.g., Belt and Road markets, the United States), including patterns such as sector coverage, capital flows, and technological upgrading, the project seeks to uncover underlying rules and decision-making logics.
Alternatively, by examining regions or countries with extensive historical experience in global expansion (e.g., the United States, Europe), the project will analyze the motivations, execution, and outcomes of overseas expansion in a given sub-sector and distill actionable business insights.
The project outcomes may support Chinese medium-to-large enterprises seeking international growth opportunities, while helping students broaden their global perspective, learn business research methodologies, and develop a deeper understanding of business and technology decision-making.
Shanghai Xin’ao Brightness Charity Foundation
AI-embedded Compaion Toy Design
Project Inforamation
Retinoblastoma (Retinoblastoma, RB) is a malignant ocular tumor that primarily occurs in children. Its treatment cycle typically lasts 4–6 years. During this period, children need to travel to Shanghai for follow-up visits every month and undergo long-term hospitalization and chemotherapy. The high-frequency treatment and hospital stays significantly limit children’s contact with the outside world, and feelings of loneliness, fear, and anxiety continue to accumulate.
In addition, parents bear heavy financial and psychological pressure and often find it difficult to provide stable emotional support over the long term, leaving children with a clear gap in psychological comfort during treatment. At present, emotional companionship services within the hospital system during RB treatment are still insufficient; children and their families urgently need low-cost, sustainable emotional support resources.
Meanwhile, elderly people who previously benefited from Xin’ao Brightness public welfare programs and regained their vision also wish to give back through concrete action, but lack suitable channels for participation. With support from DKU’s university-enterprise co-creation platform, this project plans to connect the elderly with children, leveraging design innovation and AI technologies to jointly build an intergenerational companionship and psychological care public welfare system—bringing courage to children and helping participating seniors regain a sense of value and warmth.
memU
Agentic Memory Framework Design
Project Inforamation
This project aims to provide students with a high-level technical co-creation experience through a real codebase, open-ended product iteration, and engineering practice. Throughout the project, students – guided jointly by mentors and company developers – will join the memU product and open-source ecosystem as collaborators and directly contribute to upgrades and iterations.
Both sides will jointly plan several themed co-creation directions, targeting real technical pain points or user needs, and form a structured learning path with concrete deliverables. Participation may work on (but is not limited to):
- Submitting high-quality PRs (Pull Requests) based on real requirements;
- Developing new feature modules and extending existing capabilities;
- Optimizing core memory logic, system architecture, or engineering workflows;
- Performance tuning, documentation improvements, and long-term maintenance of the open-source project.
The project will also jointly develop supporting technical tutorials and engineering practice guides; complete project documentation, API references, and developer guides; and public-facing outputs such as technical articles, case analyses, and project showcases. Relevant achievements may be published via memU’s official public channels and other platforms, increasing visibility of student work and contributing to sustainable knowledge sharing in the open-source community.
Xiao-X-Bao
Open Coding Community
Project Inforamation
In collaboration with Xiao-X-Bao, students will select projects of interest via the Task Hub at https://info.xiao-x-bao.com.cn, join project groups, and collaborate with external engineers and leading domain physicians on co-development. Development work will focus primarily on code implementation and technical infrastructure, while some projects may also involve designing community incentive mechanisms and operations strategies.
Through participation, students will strengthen project management, cross-team collaboration, user research, and iterative optimization capabilities, and gain first-hand experience with real R&D workflows and teamwork in an innovation ecosystem, thereby improving practical technical skills and comprehensive problem-solving abilities.
Potential projects include:
- 小雪宝- Leukemia AI Care Assistant
- 小芙宝 – Intelligent RAG System for Three Major Gynecological Cancers
- Radiotherapy Assistant RAG System
- 双心宝 – AI Assistant for Dual-Condition (Heart + Mental Health) Care
- Osteosarcoma Project
- 2,000+ patient groups / operations initiatives
FSHD Qingnian Road Community & The Chance Foundation
Rare Disease Open Coding Community
Project Inforamation
This project focuses on leveraging technology to address health-related challenges, partnering with an open-source community dedicated to supporting rare disease patients. The goal is to promote transparency in disease information, diversify patient support, and facilitate the co-creation and iterative development of digital tools. The project centers on Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD), a rare disease. Under the guidance of mentors from industry and research, participants will gain an in-depth understanding of the specific needs faced by the FSHD patient community and collaboratively develop one or two new functional modules based on an existing open-source platform.
The project will adopt a user-needs-driven collaborative development model. Potential focus areas include, but are not limited to:
- Symptom tracking and logging (e.g., muscle strength, fatigue levels, impact on daily life)
- Medical resource or patient case-sharing mechanisms
- Task management or reminder systems for caregivers
- Accessibility-focused user interface optimizations
- Data visualization or statistical analysis tools to help patients better understand their condition
- Anonymized data collection modules for research purposes
The team will progress through stages such as research, prototyping, user testing, and iterative development to complete the product. A final presentation will be delivered to the community and partners at the end of the term. This project not only provides hands-on experience in software development and human-centered design but also encourages participants to use technology to drive social innovation in public health, truly embodying the principle of “people-first” solutions.
Six Arts Museum
Exhibition
Project Inforamation
This project will focus on deep collaboration around “cultural and creative co-creation.” From its rich collection of folk and cultural artworks, Six Arts Museum will select a set of exhibits to be loaned to DKU for a short-term themed exhibition on campus. Centered on these exhibits, a DKU student team will participate end-to-end in curatorial work, including theme ideation, exhibition and spatial design, installation/layout, exhibition narrative, copywriting, and interactive experience design. The project will not only provide students with an immersive curatorial practice opportunity, but also help build a sustainable collaboration platform between Six Arts Museum and DKU.
Six Arts Museum
Digital Archive
Project Inforamation
Six Arts Museum holds a large collection of valuable traditional objects and folk artifacts, but it currently lacks a systematic digital archive. As a result, the collection’s images, historical context, and cultural value are difficult to access and understand at scale. Physical exhibitions are constrained by space and outreach, and they are not ideal for long-term preservation or educational reuse. There is therefore an urgent need to establish a standardized Digital Archive that digitizes and consolidates exhibit images and related historical materials, supporting broader access, preservation, research, and reuse.
This project aims to support Six Arts Museum in building a systematic Digital Archive for its collection. The student team will produce high-resolution images for representative exhibits and organize supporting information such as historical background, cultural context, and craftsmanship details, forming standardized digital image records with accompanying written descriptions and background stories. Through digitization and content curation, the project will help the museum better preserve exhibit information and lay a foundation for future online exhibitions, educational resources, and public communications.
Daily Tea
Market Design & Execution
Project Inforamation
This project aims to design and execute a Chinese-aesthetics-themed market by combining students’ creative practice with local cultural scenes in Kunshan, building a platform that integrates cultural expression, community participation, and capability development. The market will revolve around themes such as “New Chinese Lifestyle” and “Everyday Expressions of Eastern Aesthetics.” Students may collaborate with the existing DKU tea club to design tea-culture experience sessions and may also independently design booths and experience sessions. Through the full project cycle—planning, operations, and on-site execution—students will strengthen skills in cultural-creative practice, project management, and cross-team collaboration.
Taskforce Consultancy
Podcast Creation on Sustainability
Project Inforamation
This project aims to engage students in planning and producing a podcast series titled Dialogues on Sustainability, centered on ESG principles and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participating students will be responsible for topic selection, scriptwriting, recording and editing episodes, community engagement, and social media outreach. Faculty members, students, or community members may also be invited as guests to join the discussions.
The project will further encourage members of the DKU community to participate in dialogue and interaction around sustainability-related topics through online sharing sessions or on-campus events. Through the entire process of production and dissemination, students will not only strengthen their teamwork, project management, and communication skills, but also transform their ideas and creativity into tangible content, thereby amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives.
Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS)
Re-Design Waste Station
Project Inforamation
This project aims to develop innovative waste-station solutions aligned with China’s “dual-carbon” goals (carbon peaking and carbon neutrality). By researching the current state of waste stations and relevant design practices in China and abroad, the project offers students ample space to apply creativity and design capabilities.
The design follows modular and productized principles, enabling flexible configuration for communities or villages of different sizes and convenient installation, while also optimizing appearance and circulation routes and ensuring efficient docking with waste-collection vehicles. Proposals may include a small version for urban residential communities and a large version for new-rural contexts, with optional on-site processing modules for kitchen waste.
Advanced features may extend to innovative on-site processing devices and the use of green energy (e.g., solar panels) to deliver a sustainable, intelligent waste-station management solution.
Watson Institute
Soical Innovation Podcast
Project Inforamation
This project will focus on conducting in-depth interviews and producing multimedia narratives around representative high-quality projects within the Watson Institute social-innovation incubation platform. Participants will hold deep conversations with founders or core team members of social enterprises and use podcasts as the primary medium to document the full journey of social-innovation projects – from concept formation to real-world implementation – highlighting their development paths, key challenges, breakthroughs, and sustainability strategies. Through this project, students will systematically learn interview methods and multimedia storytelling, and cultivate critical thinking and social-entrepreneurship skills through real cases.
Buy42
Creative Co-Creation
Project Inforamation
To further explore the practice of “Business for Good” and expand the expressive dimensions of public welfare innovation, Buy42 hopes to collaborate with Duke Kunshan University to jointly create a co-creation platform that integrates narrative expression, sustainable design, and inclusive experiences. The project aims to transform the public welfare resources, circular materials, and humanistic stories accumulated by Buy42 into innovative carriers with emotional connection and communication power through cross-disciplinary collaboration. We hope to reinterpret the value concepts of sustainability and inclusion through means such as cultural and creative product development, interactive experience planning, and spatial media co-creation, using youthful, digital, and artistic language, providing inspiring practical examples for social innovation and public welfare communication.
- Inclusive Co-creation of Peripheral Products:Combining Buy42’s public welfare stories and circular materials, utilizing technologies such as 3D printing and digital design, to co-create with students narrative-driven peripheral products and in-store interactive installations. Emphasis is placed on incorporating universal design principles to ensure the outcomes possess aesthetic value, functional friendliness, and social inclusivity, making creativity truly serve diverse populations.
- Joint Planning of Sustainable Experiences: Centered around themes of “Item Rebirth” and “Community Integration,” students are encouraged to plan public welfare experiences that integrate online and offline elements. Examples include: designing AR story interactions based on 3D printed outcomes, developing sustainability-themed workshops, planning public welfare pop-up exhibitions, etc. The goal is to enhance the appeal of Buy42’s brand communication and public engagement through youthful and creative language.
PEER
PEER & DKU Partner
Project Inforamation
Through the collaboration between Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and PEER, this project recruits the “PEER & DKU Partner” to support and expand PEER’s educational and social innovation practices across different contexts. Key activities include (but are not limited to):
- Launching a series of Green Education projects in county areas. PEER & DKU Partner will serve as mentors to county secondary-school student teams, participate in defining challenge themes and designing solutions, and may have opportunities to work in-person with students to advance the challenge competition and evaluation.
- Building and managing a DKU volunteer system, coordinating resources so volunteer teams can systematically teach the concepts and methods of Social Innovation to county schools and local high school students in Kunshan—achieving mutual growth in educational practice and social innovation capabilities.
Daily Tea
Tea Club
Project Inforamation
Leveraging Daily Tea’s cultural content and community-operation experience, this project aims to co-build a student-led tea culture club at DKU. The club will support students in designing and hosting activities for learning, sharing, and hands-on experience around tea culture, and will promote the understanding, dissemination, and youth-oriented expression of Chinese traditional culture on campus.
The project also seeks to create cross-cultural interaction opportunities so that more international students and partners can gain a deeper understanding of Chinese tea culture and experience its unique charm through participatory, hands-on activities. In doing so, the project will further develop students’ organizational skills, cultural creativity, and intercultural communication competence, forming a sustainable campus cultural community.
Taskforce Consultancy
Suzhou Culture Promoting
Project Inforamation
Leveraging Daily Tea’s cultural content and community-operation experience, this project aims to co-build a student-led tea culture club at DKU. The club will support students in designing and hosting activities for learning, sharing, and hands-on experience around tea culture, and will promote the understanding, dissemination, and youth-oriented expression of Chinese traditional culture on campus.
The project also seeks to create cross-cultural interaction opportunities so that more international students and partners can gain a deeper understanding of Chinese tea culture and experience its unique charm through participatory, hands-on activities. In doing so, the project will further develop students’ organizational skills, cultural creativity, and intercultural communication competence, forming a sustainable campus cultural community.
JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle)
Project Inforamation
In the process of practicing “waste rebirth” and community space creation, the “Parallel Library” project has formed a mature sustainable public welfare model. To further break the boundaries of the existing model and enhance its innovative vitality and local adaptability, this project intends to cooperate deeply with DKU students. It aims to integrate young perspectives and innovative thinking into the project process to explore the potential of this model in broader social and educational dimensions. Core cooperation will revolve around the following directions: co-creation of sustainable design topics and design of community activity models.
S-Tron China
DKU Start-up Community Building
Project Inforamation
This project establishes a strategic partnership with S-Tron to recruit the student ambassador from DKU. The student ambassador will serve as the bridge and core support between DKU and S-Tron, helping advance joint programs and activities and enabling linkage of on- and off-campus resources. Responsibilities include (but are not limited to):
- Supporting the execution of S-Tron’s programs and activities at DKU.
- Assisting with planning and organizing on-campus meetups for student entrepreneurs, talks (Collide Lab), and other educational extension activities.
- Participating in innovation and entrepreneurship events such as TechTrek, and promoting deeper interaction in university–enterprise collaboration.
Through participation, the student ambassador will gain hands-on experience in project management and cross-organization communication, strengthen leadership and innovation capabilities, and better understand how enterprise–university cooperation works in practice.
Kunshan Gaoxinqu Tinglin Community Health Service Center
Smart Health Care-Support
Project Inforamation
In partnership with Kunshan Gaoxinqu Tinglin Community Health Service Center, students will collaborate with the community to develop and practice smart-healthcare projects, exploring opportunities to optimize primary healthcare services around user needs, data support, and technology enablement. Students will also have opportunities to shadow community general practitioners in offline clinical practice, gaining a deeper understanding of day-to-day operations and service models in primary healthcare.
The project will also incorporate a series of community service activities, including health education outreach, home visits with family doctors, and support for health checkups for older adults. Through multi-dimensional field participation, students will strengthen their ability to understand and respond to community health needs, cultivate real-world problem-solving skills and social responsibility, and further explore how innovative solutions can improve community health and public services.
Weicheng Community (Supported by Leren Public Welfare Development Center)
Project Inforamation
Weicheng Community residents have significant demands for high-quality life services such as cultural entertainment, health management, and lifelong learning, but the existing community service supply is presented in a traditional way, making it difficult to achieve precise reach. The community contains rich potential resources such as professional knowledge, skills, experience, and social networks. However, due to the lack of systematic mining mechanisms and interaction platforms, these valuable resources have not yet formed an effective internal loop within the community. Channels for residents to participate in public affairs mainly rely on offline centralized activities; the participation mode is passive and singular, making it difficult to meet personalized and normalized participation needs, leading to insufficient internal motivation for community co-construction and co-governance. This status quo of supply-demand mismatch, idle resources, and insufficient participation restricts the development process of the community’s transition and upgrade from basic life services to a high-quality spiritual and cultural community.
Preliminary Ideas & Feasible Directions:
- Community Activity Development & Operations:Led by student teams, design and implement courses and activities that are close to resident needs, such as aesthetic education design, health and wellness, and intergenerational integration, to empower the community.
- Community Digital Platform Exploration & Construction: Explore and develop digital tools suitable for the community to enhance service information transparency and resident participation convenience, providing sustainable technical support for community governance.
Kejiaoyuan Community (Supported by Leren Public Welfare Development Center)
Project Inforamation
The existing service model of Kejiaoyuan Community remains relatively traditional and has failed to leverage the knowledge-intensive environment and diverse family structures of the Higher Education Area. This results in low resource utilization and insufficient service precision. Meanwhile, while residents have a strong willingness to participate in community affairs, their channels are limited. The lack of a systematic and open participation mechanism makes it difficult to transform the community’s considerable intellectual capital and professional capabilities into endogenous motivation for sustained development. Consequently, this hinders the community’s evolution from a mere “living space” to a “vibrant community.
Preliminary Ideas & Feasible Directions:
- Community Activity Development & Operations:Led by student teams, design and implement courses and activities that are close to resident needs, such as aesthetic education design, health and wellness, and intergenerational integration, to empower the community.
- Community Digital Platform Exploration & Construction:Explore and develop digital tools suitable for the community to enhance service information transparency and resident participation convenience, providing sustainable technical support for community governance.
University Park Community, Bailu Urban Management Office, Kunshan High-tech Zone
Project Inforamation
The University Park Community faces increasingly complex and diverse demands arising from the coexistence of multiple groups, including students, faculty members, researchers, enterprise employees, and local residents. Traditional service delivery models are struggling to meet these needs with sufficient precision and innovation.
In response, the Community Center seeks to explore more interactive and creative approaches to grassroots governance. By enhancing the cultural environment, improving public service experiences, and strengthening connections among different groups, the project aims to transform the university town into a model community characterized by a strong sense of belonging and sustained innovation.
Preliminary Ideas & Feasible Directions:
- Long-term Student Community Leadership Program: Student leader will form teams as “Community Co-Creation Partners” and the team will be embedded in the Center’s day-to-day work. By focusing on specific themes like international community integration or green development in and around the campus, students will engage in ongoing research and hands-on project implementation.
- Co-creation of Public Services and Community Spaces: Building on the Center’s existing facilities and service programs, students will participate in the design and execution of small-scale space improvements, cultural and community events, and digital service process optimization, with the goal of enhancing overall service quality and user experience.
- Applied Research and Solution Design for Community Governance: Students will conduct practice-oriented research on shared governance challenges within the university town, including smart community development, volunteer service systems, and community cultural branding. The outcomes will provide forward-looking solutions and policy-relevant insights to support the Center’s decision-making.
Shaocun Community, Lujia Town, Kunshan City
Project Inforamation
The community currently faces several challenges, including limited vitality in public spaces, aging environmental facilities, and a lack of diverse after-school and cultural activities, particularly for children and adolescents. To address these issues, the project seeks to introduce the creativity and energy of student teams. Through aesthetic enhancement, curriculum design, and collaborative operations, the initiative aims to revitalize community spaces, enrich residents’ daily lives, and strengthen community cohesion and a shared sense of belonging.
Preliminary Ideas and Potential Directions:
- Aesthetic Enhancement of Community Spaces:Public spaces will be revitalized through art installations, mural painting, and small-scale landscape improvements, enhancing the visual appeal and overall environment while shaping a more engaging and distinctive community identity.
- Development of Public Art Education Programs: A series of art education courses, such as painting, handicrafts, and creative arts, will be designed for children and adolescents. These programs will integrate local cultural elements to enhance aesthetic literacy and provide meaningful and enriching after-school experiences.
- Collaborative Volunteer-Based Operations Model: Student teams will work closely with community staff to jointly manage activity planning, space maintenance, project implementation, and impact assessment. This approach aims to develop a scalable and sustainable model for community co-creation and long-term engagement.