Co-Innovate Projects
Partner
Project Type
Duration
Applicant Type
PEER
County Studies
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.
View project
Vidacity Shanghai
STEM Program Design
This project will be carried out in collaboration with Vidacity Shanghai. Participating students will, under guidance, design and implement creative STEM programs, which may include hands-on projects using design thinking, 3D printing, and other maker-based activities. The curriculum is tailored for children aged 5–10 and emphasizes both creative exploration and practical application. Students will also travel to Shanghai to mentor, teach, and iteratively refine the program on-site.
View project
Impact Hub Shanghai
SDG-related Consultation
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.
View project
Reactor School
Shanghai Start-up Community Research
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 financing support for county-level innovation and entrepreneurship and coordinated low-carbon transition across the petrochemical and chemical value chains. 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.
View project
WhaleSights
Going Global Research
“Going global” has become one of the hottest topics and top priorities for Chinese companies today. This project focuses on a specific outbound-expansion actor 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, 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, 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.
View project
Shanghai Xin’ao Brightness Charity Foundation
AI-embedded Companion Toy Design
Retinoblastoma is a malignant ocular tumor that primarily occurs in children, whose treatment can involve years of frequent follow-up visits, hospitalization, and chemotherapy. The project responds to gaps in emotional companionship for affected children and their families, while also creating a way for elderly beneficiaries of Xin’ao Brightness programs to give back. With support from DKU’s university-enterprise co-creation platform, the project plans to connect elderly participants with children and leverage design innovation and AI technologies to build an intergenerational companionship and psychological care public welfare system.
View project
memU
Agentic Memory Framework Design
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. Students will join the memU product and open-source ecosystem as collaborators and directly contribute to upgrades and iterations. Possible work includes submitting high-quality pull requests, developing new feature modules, extending existing capabilities, optimizing core memory logic and system architecture, performance tuning, documentation improvements, and long-term maintenance. The project will also produce tutorials, engineering guides, API references, developer documentation, technical articles, case analyses, and project showcases.
View project
Xiao-X-Bao
Open Coding Community
In collaboration with Xiao-X-Bao, students will select projects of interest via the Task Hub, 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. Potential projects include a Leukemia AI Care Assistant, an intelligent RAG system for three major gynecological cancers, a radiotherapy assistant RAG system, an AI assistant for dual-condition heart and mental-health care, an osteosarcoma project, and operations initiatives involving 2,000+ patient groups.
View project
FSHD Qingnian Road Community & The Chance Foundation
Rare Disease Open Coding Community
This project focuses on leveraging technology to address health-related challenges through an open-source community supporting rare disease patients, centered on Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD). Participants will understand patient-community needs and collaboratively develop one or two new functional modules on an existing open-source platform. Potential focus areas include symptom tracking, medical resource or case sharing, caregiver task management and reminders, accessibility-oriented UI optimization, data visualization and statistical analysis, and anonymized research-data collection. The team will progress through research, prototyping, user testing, iterative development, and a final presentation.
View project
Six Arts Museum
Exhibition
This project will focus on deep collaboration around cultural and creative co-creation. Six Arts Museum will select exhibits from its collection of folk and cultural artworks to be loaned to DKU for a short-term themed exhibition on campus. A DKU student team will participate end-to-end in curatorial work, including theme ideation, exhibition and spatial design, installation and layout, exhibition narrative, copywriting, and interactive experience design. The project also aims to build a sustainable collaboration platform between Six Arts Museum and DKU.
View projectSix Arts Museum
Digital Archive
Six Arts Museum holds a large collection of traditional objects and folk artifacts but lacks a systematic digital archive. This project aims to support the museum in building a standardized Digital Archive by producing high-resolution images for representative exhibits and organizing supporting information such as historical background, cultural context, craftsmanship details, written descriptions, and background stories. The archive will support preservation, broader access, research, educational reuse, future online exhibitions, and public communications.
View project
Daily Tea
Market Design & Execution
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. Themes may include “New Chinese Lifestyle” and “Everyday Expressions of Eastern Aesthetics.” Students may collaborate with the DKU tea club to design tea-culture experience sessions or independently design booths and activities, gaining experience across planning, operations, and on-site execution.
View project
Taskforce Consultancy
Podcast Creation on Sustainability
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. Students will be responsible for topic selection, scriptwriting, recording and editing, community engagement, and social media outreach, and may invite faculty, students, or community members as guests. The project also encourages broader DKU community dialogue around sustainability through online sharing sessions or campus events.
View project
Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS)
Re-Design Waste Station
This project aims to develop innovative waste-station solutions aligned with China’s dual-carbon goals. By researching current waste stations and relevant design practices in China and abroad, students will develop modular and productized solutions that can be flexibly configured for communities or villages of different sizes, while improving appearance, circulation routes, installation, and compatibility with waste-collection vehicles. Proposals may include small urban-community versions, larger new-rural versions, kitchen-waste processing modules, and advanced features such as on-site processing devices and green-energy systems.
View project
Watson Institute
Social Innovation Podcast
This project will conduct in-depth interviews and produce multimedia narratives around representative projects within the Watson Institute social-innovation incubation platform. Participants will interview founders or core team members of social enterprises and use podcasts as the primary medium to document the path from concept formation to real-world implementation, including development paths, key challenges, breakthroughs, and sustainability strategies. Students will develop interview, multimedia storytelling, critical-thinking, and social-entrepreneurship skills.
View project
Buy42
Creative Co-Creation
Buy42 hopes to collaborate with Duke Kunshan University to create a co-creation platform integrating narrative expression, sustainable design, and inclusive experiences. The project aims to transform Buy42’s public-welfare resources, circular materials, and humanistic stories into innovative carriers through cultural and creative product development, interactive experience planning, and spatial-media co-creation. Possible directions include inclusive co-creation of peripheral products using 3D printing and digital design, universal-design principles, AR story interactions, sustainability-themed workshops, and public-welfare pop-up exhibitions.
View projectPEER
PEER & DKU Partner
Through the collaboration between Duke Kunshan University and PEER, this project recruits the “PEER & DKU Partner” to support and expand PEER’s educational and social innovation practices. Activities may include launching Green Education projects in county areas, mentoring secondary-school student teams, helping define challenge themes and solutions, participating in challenge competitions and evaluation, and building and managing a DKU volunteer system to systematically teach Social Innovation concepts and methods to county schools and local high school students in Kunshan.
View project
Daily Tea
Tea Club
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, promote understanding and youth-oriented expression of Chinese traditional culture on campus, and create cross-cultural interaction opportunities for international students and partners. The project also develops students’ organizational, cultural-creative, and intercultural-communication skills.
View project
Taskforce Consultancy
Suzhou Culture Promoting
This project aims to promote DKU students’ in-depth understanding and first-hand experience of Suzhou’s history and cultural landscapes through student-led community building and event participation, while strengthening intercultural communication and civic/community engagement. A student leader will serve as project Ambassador, responsible for promotion, volunteer recruitment, organization, and coordination. The ambassador will work with Taskforce Consultancy, Suzhou Foreign Affairs Institute, and Suzhou Language Volunteers for the Global Visitors initiative to design and execute innovative and interactive activities.
View project
JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle)
Parallel Library
In the process of practicing “waste rebirth” and community space creation, the Parallel Library project has formed a mature sustainable public-welfare model. This project intends to cooperate deeply with DKU students to break the boundaries of the existing model, enhance innovation and local adaptability, and integrate young perspectives and innovative thinking. Core cooperation will revolve around co-creation of sustainable design topics and design of community activity models.
View project
S-Tron China
DKU Start-up Community Building
This project establishes a strategic partnership with S-Tron to recruit a student ambassador from DKU. The ambassador will act as a bridge between DKU and S-Tron, supporting joint programs and activities and connecting on- and off-campus resources. Responsibilities include supporting S-Tron programs at DKU, planning and organizing on-campus meetups for student entrepreneurs and talks, participating in events such as TechTrek, and promoting deeper university-enterprise collaboration. Students gain experience in project management, cross-organization communication, leadership, and innovation.
View project
Kunshan Gaoxinqu Tinglin Community Health Service Center
Smart Health Care-Support
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 may shadow community general practitioners in offline clinical practice and participate in health education outreach, home visits with family doctors, and health-checkup support for older adults. The project develops understanding of community health needs, real-world problem solving, and social responsibility.
View project
Weicheng Community (Supported by Leren Public Welfare Development Center)
Community Buliding
This project establishes a strategic partnership with Weicheng Community, a high-quality aging community rich in “silver-hair wisdom.” The challenge is to design creative activities or digital platforms that foster intergenerational exchange and activate senior resources, with an emphasis on long-term operations and sustainable student-community initiatives. Potential directions include creative development and operation of community activity ecosystems and innovative exploration of community digital enablement.
View project
University Park Community, Bailu Urban Management Office, Kunshan High-tech Zone
Community Buliding
This project establishes a strategic partnership with the University Park Community, Bailu Urban Management Office, Kunshan, to recruit students as “Community Co-Creation Partners.” Students will leverage community venues and resources to design and implement creative initiatives that energize the community and foster integration among diverse groups, taking ownership of the entire process. The project emphasizes exploring long-term operational models and may involve community activity ecosystems, community governance, and digital innovation.
View project
Shaocun Community, Lujia Town, Kunshan City
Community Buliding
This project establishes a strategic partnership with Shaocun Community, Lujia Town, Kunshan City. The community aims to enhance public-space quality and create a distinctive themed block. Students will act as “curators,” developing tailored plans through aesthetic enhancement, art education, or collaborative volunteer models. Potential directions include community-space aesthetic enhancement, public-welfare art education curriculum development, and collaborative volunteer-based operations, with a strong focus on tangible implementation.
View project