Research explores entrepreneurial opportunities in overlooked spaces

In Xi'an, China, a village is nestled between the walls of a recycling center and a junkyard. Constructed with recycled metal billboards, broken appliances, and other available materials, the village provides a haven for its residents, who live in poverty. 

At its core is an entrepreneur working to solve a housing crisis.

“Humans can solve problems in incredible ways,” said Rick Hunt, the Dorothy Hottel Digges Professorship in Entrepreneurship in the Pamplin College of Business’ Department of Management. “In our research, we explored two communities in China where entrepreneurs are solving challenges by creating affordable housing and restructuring social arrangements.”

Hunt collaborated with Shuang Frost from Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, and Adam Frost from the Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore a rooftop enclave for educated rural migrants in Shanghai, China, and a junkyard village for individuals experiencing poverty in Xi’an, China. 

To better understand the communities, Hunt and the research team used hand-drawn ethnographies, or sketches, from multiple visits to the two spaces. Over a three-year period, Shuang and Adam Frost lived in each location for several months at a time creating the sketches. According to Hunt, this immersion into the community created an opportunity to connect with the individuals who created the living environments. In each of the ethnographies, they aimed to understand the adaptations and amenities provided to the residents. 

The rooftop enclave in Shanghai is a three-story residential structure that sits on top of a high-rise commercial office building. With apartments as small as 60 square feet, the 60 units catered to a variety of occupants, primarily those who came from rural communities seeking careers in the city. The highest rent was half the price of an average city-center studio apartment in Shanghai. The entrepreneur who started the community consistently updated accommodations, such as enhancing the internet connectivity or engineering a system for water drainage and sewage. 

In Xi’an, the village catered to the begging poor. Constructed from wooden pallets, old appliances, scraps of metal, and even billboards, the community fell under the eye of its urban city surroundings. Yet, similarly to the rooftop enclave of Shanghai, the entrepreneur organizing the community continued to enhance amenities such as using oil barrels converted to wood-burning stoves.

The paper by Frost, Frost and Hunt aims to change the way people think of using physical spaces. Historically, entrepreneurs considered physical space as a location for their budding ventures. The new research approach considers physical space as a venture. Hunt compares the communities in China to the tiny house movement in the United States, where builders are creating affordable housing that is mobile and small. In both instances, entrepreneurs are coming up with novel solutions for physical space to solve a housing crisis.

Through these two communities, the research showed ways in which entrepreneurs develop solutions to societal challenges.  In using ethnographies, Hunt and his co-authors are among the first researchers to expand theory surrounding entrepreneurship and identify physical and unused space as a target for business.

The paper received a Best Paper award at the 2025 Academy of Management Conference Proceedings in July.