The Application Research On PBL Driven Design Thinking For Community-Supported Entrepreneurship

With the improvement of residents’ living quality,Chinese residential communities are transforming from the single living area to the meaningful place with comprehensive functions and diverse lifestyles.As the informal interaction place,residential communities have natural living behaviors,multiple needs of cross generations and complicated daily living problems.Such potential resources can provide more incubation supports for entrepreneurial projects than those in urban central areas.Recently,designers,architects,social workers and other actors have also noticed such resources.Entrepreneurial projects launched by them have created economic and social values around the objectives of improving neighborhood relations,public and customized living services,and community innovation ecosystem.This kind of community-supported entrepreneurship(CSE),which uses community space,new policies,living behaviors,residents contributions and other resources as supports,has increasingly become the promising trend and important topic in the field of research and practice.Based on reviewing related researches,this study focuses on the gap between a huge potential needs of future CSE,and the lack of targeted entrepreneurial method that can match local community features,CSE process,tasks and entrepreneur abilities.Towards solving this problem,three interrelated research questions are put forward in this study based on the advantages and integration possibilities of PBL and design thinking method:1)what are the core abilities of PBL driven design thinking method to promote CSE actions?2)what are the CSE process-based task and capability goals in local context?3)how to use PBL driven Design Thinking methods to promote CSE action and entrepreneurs’ capabilities that can develop community resource and build competitive advantage effectively?The research process is as follows:Firstly,this study defines the concept and characteristics of PBL driven design thinking method and its advantageous ability to promote CSE through literature and case analysis.Secondly,it collects the qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with founders or other members of typical CSE cases.With data coding method based on the Grounded Theory,this study builds CSE promoting steps,action modes,development route and market expansion type.According to above research results,this study builds the CSE process-based task(including 7 subtasks in forward order).Thirdly,this study analyzes the capability goal that CSE entrepreneurs should have through the experiment with Kelly Repertory Grid Technique.Under the guidance of cross-analysis for process-based task and capability goal,the preliminary assumptions for functions of CSE method have been established.Fourthly,with questionnaire survey method,this study analyzes the features of CSE method users,potential entrepreneurs’ recognition for capability goal,the matching of capability goal and process-based task,and the function and expected utility of this method.Based on above conclusions,the key points of PBL driven design thinking method development have been established.Fifthly,the application framework of PBL driven design thinking method has been established with such key points,including a dynamic process,corresponding tasks,visualization tools and resource redesign suggestions.Finally,the effectiveness of this framework is verified by two groups of experiments,and all research questions have been answered.The research contribution includes:1)it provides CSE practitioners an action guidance and paradigm derived from real cases,which are applicable to the local context and diverse business concepts.2)this study uses the data analysis methods from sociology and cognition,and combined with the verification approach of action guidance tools from the design discipline,which presents an idea for emerging CSE issues in interdisciplinary field.3)this study expands the ability scope of CSE actors,changing their roles from environmental concept creators to leaders with systematic business solutions to deal with complex community social problems.It can also provide a bottom-up approach reference for practitioners in the fields of community governance,community development and community economy.