Class a testing ground for students — and products

Nondisclosure agreements are distributed at the first meeting of Perry Lowe’s honors marketing class at Bentley College in Waltham; once the students sign them, the course begins. That’s because course material often consists of prototypes for new products and internal marketing data. Lowe, who is a senior lecturer in marketing at the university, takes pride in using real-world products and business plans as textbooks.

By D.C. Denison, Globe Staff

”It’s a more vivid experience for students when they are dealing with both theory and practice,” he said early Friday morning as students straggled into his class, peeled off a few layers of clothing, and sparked up their laptops.

This semester, Lowe’s texts are Tablet PCs, which were introduced with great fanfare by Microsoft late last year, and Groove, a software collaboration product that has been customized to run on the devices. Microsoft, Groove, and four hardware manufacturers have donated a variety of Tablet-related products and services to Lowe’s class; in return, the companies are hoping to harvest feedback and suggestions from a select group: college students with a very active interest in business and marketing.

Lowe’s class of 12 is not only using and evaluating these products, students will also be making presentations, toward the end of the semester, on how these companies might launch Tablets and related technology into the very lucrative higher education market.

Bentley students are already familiar with the arrangement. Since 2001, the school has required that all bachelor of science students take a core curriculum course, Integrated Business Functions, that is also based around real-world new products and services.

On Friday morning before the class got rolling, students discussed some of the products they’ve used in classes. It was apparent that one of the benefits of this approach is what it’s not: an appreciation of the genius behind Starbucks and Nike and Pop Tarts. Instead, it is close encounters with false starts, half-baked plans, poorly conceived ideas, and clumsily executed prototypes. The students described experiences with a number of software products that didn’t work and services that chased the wrong market. The lameness of some products, apparently, was not much of a detriment; the students appeared to enjoy the interaction with the product development process, whatever the outcome.

Lowe and other faculty members at Bentley are always on the lookout for products on their way to market or existing products searching for new markets. Lowe’s office has the feel of a museum of prototypes past and present that have been fodder for Bentley classes. The companies that have worked with Bentley include Au Bon Pain, Exercycle, and PeopleSoft.

”My goal is to capture projects and situations that we can use in the course,” Lowe said. ”I’m always looking for products that we can realistically bring into the classroom.”

For the companies involved, a Bentley course is a unique opportunity for some free market research from a target audience.

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(There are many opportunities for similar relationships between our schools and business. The College of Technology in Missoula has many relationships with major companies like Polaris, Honda, Arctic Cat. etc. What shools can your company work with in any number of areas?- Russ)

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Geoffrey Palmer, the president of Newton-based InfoCater, a Tablet PC re-seller and consultant, began working with Lowe’s students at the beginning of the semester, providing demo units, industry contacts, and technical expertise. Now he makes a point of attending every class.

”I’ve learned an amazing amount from this group,” he said after the class.

Asked for specifics, Palmer mentioned that he had not realized how important CD drives were to this age group (most Tablets do not come with CD drives), how indispensable keyboards are (some Tablets don’t have them), and the importance of warranties (because Tablets are designed to be used standing up, they get dropped more often than laptops).

The mutual interests of these two groups — students and companies — now overlap at Bentley to such a degree that ”interaction with real-world products” is starting to be part of the marketing for the school. Bentley brochures trumpet ”Hands-on High Tech” as a selling point. Significantly, Lowe’s class takes place in a new, very slick Center for Marketing Technology that looks like it was designed to be very welcoming for visiting companies and their products.

And the marketing spin makes some sense in a very competitive market for business school students. Harvard Business School, for example, does not allow companies to distribute products to students for evaluation. The university worries that the relationship could be manipulated by a company into an endorsement — ”Created at Harvard Business School!” ”Designed with the help of Harvard Business School students!”

But for Bentley this kind of interaction — incorporating real and emerging products into its curriculum — is now a part of its ”core brand identity,” as one of professor Lowe’s students might say.

D.C. Denison can be reached at [email protected].

This story ran on page F2 of the Boston Globe on 2/23/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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