Science Research Management ›› 2023, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (7): 105-113.

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Research on the operational mechanism of digital enabled maker space

Fang Zixu1, Xu Li2   

  1. 1. School of Economics and Management, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, Jiangxi, China;
    2. Business School, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, Jiangxi, China
  • Received:2023-03-13 Revised:2023-05-27 Online:2023-07-20 Published:2023-07-20

Abstract: Mass entrepreneurship and innovation are important forces that stimulate the vitality of social innovation and entrepreneurship, and create new driving forces for economic development. As a carrier of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation", the maker space is an important component of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, which drives China to become one of the top innovative countries and a world power in science and technology innovation. However, the supply of entrepreneurial services in the maker spaces is currently facing bottlenecks, and the effectiveness of entrepreneurial services is poor. The main reason is that the operating mechanism of the maker space is not standardized, which is reflected in the mutual independence and information asymmetry between the relevant entities in the operation and management of the maker space, forming a "data island", which hinders the collaborative interaction between entrepreneurial supply and demand and reduces the quality of entrepreneurial services. 
      Based on a review of previous literature, this paper mainly focused on the operational mechanism of traditional maker spaces, neglects specialized maker spaces, separates the composition of elements and operational mechanism of maker spaces, thus failing to systematically reveal the operational way of maker spaces. Reviewing the research on digital technology and entrepreneurial activities, it mainly focuses on a single perspective and level. However, entrepreneurship is a process that requires exploring the impact of digital technology on entrepreneurial activities from the perspective of integrating entrepreneurial projects and resources, as well as cross-level exploration of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Therefore, this paper attempts to introduce digital technology into the operation and management of maker spaces. Taking "Zhongke Xinke" as the case of study, we will build the operational mechanism for a specialized maker space based on digital enabling, promoting the maker space to become a low-cost, high-quality, and widely covering innovation and entrepreneurship service system. 
     The research conclusions are as follows: the operational mechanism of the maker space based on digital enabling includes the composition of the elements, internal logic, and operational ways of the maker space. As the foundation of the operation mechanism of the maker space, the elements of the digital enabled maker space include three parts: the entrepreneurial subject, the entrepreneurial service ecosystem, and the entrepreneurial peripheral ecosystem. As the logical basis for the operation mechanism of the maker space, the inherent logic of digital enabling of the maker space is the interaction and influence of the three elements, achieving a progressive consensus on demand, collaborative symbiosis, and value co-creation. Among them, demand consensus is the foundation, collaborative symbiosis is the core, and value co-creation is the goal. As the main body of the operation mechanism of the crowdsourcing space, the operation method of the digital enabled crowdsourcing space includes precise identification of entrepreneurial needs (including precise perception, precise mining and precise analysis of entrepreneurial needs), as well as precise docking and precise supervision of entrepreneurial needs.
     The innovations of this paper are as follows: Firstly, it attempts to introduce digital technology into the operational mechanism of maker space, explore the impact of digital technology on entrepreneurial activities from a cross level perspective in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, build the operational mechanism of maker space based on digital enabling, and expand the research scope of digital technology and entrepreneurial activities. Second, different from focusing on the operational mechanism of the traditional maker space, which overemphasizes the traditional entrepreneurial ecological systems theory and ignores the development practice of maker space, this paper focuses on the specialized maker space and explores its operational mechanism by introducing the typical case of "Zhongke Xinke". Thirdly, it analyzes the roles and internal connections of its constituent elements, integrates them into the operational mechanism, systematically reveals the operational ways of the maker space, and thus building a hierarchical operational mechanism for the maker space.

Key words: digital enabling, maker space, operational mechanism