Innovation is a key focus of VCU, and its Da Vinci Center, which is focused on product development and product innovation. Experimentation is also in keeping with these themes, and that’s where the Shift Retail Lab comes into play.
“Shift Lab was this experiment that we ran when thinking about how little had changed in American higher education when it comes to this space,” says Westlake. “We had this idea, what if you built a real-life lab to conduct that kind of work? That’s what we did with Shift Retail Lab. It started with this initial idea for a student storefront, and then transformed into this retail laboratory.”
He adds, “What this looks like is that students and our corporate partners are putting real products on the shelf. We’re engaging customers and doing tactile hands-on interaction with products, and the students are learning both how to do that work, and then we’re also providing that as a service for our corporate partners. Students have the ability to actually sell their products and services out of this space, and they keep 100% of the proceeds.”
Consumer feedback is key to the process, as participants gain insights and develop further iterations of their products.
Westlake notes, “The original impetus for this was how do we create a more dynamic learning space where we can bring our corporate partners? For example, we’ve been doing projects for Pfizer for the last ten years. We’ve done 15 industry sponsored products for Pfizer. Four of them wound up on the shelf. And it’s a space like this that we felt was key to do some of that early-stage testing. We’ve been able to serve hundreds of startups and early-stage ventures through this space, as well as corporate partners. And we’ve had thousands of people come through the door.”
The physical space of retail, such as pop-up shops, for example, is showing a revival as a counterpoint to the growth of ecommerce.
“What we’re seeing is this blending of themes. People still want to see, touch, and taste things before they invest in them on Kickstarter, before they invest in them as an angel or VC or somewhere later down the road,” he says. “This space has become that early-stage testing ground.”
He adds, “We quickly realized there was a huge gap in the marketplace for this type of storefront that can be built to turn over quickly. We worked with a designer to build the space as a black box theater. From the start, the space was designed to be flipped over instantaneously so that we can do entire takeovers of the space. And an interesting insight we had as well was that it’s helped a lot of our underrepresented founders secure funding that they weren’t able to do on their own. How cool is it to see people engaging with your product in the real world?”
Insights derived from the product development and feedback the students gain can be translated back to corporate partners and their design efforts.
Westlake continues, “You hear things like, Shift helps me to find my brand voice. We see people continue to try out different variations of their products and services while they’re in the space. It’s led to some interesting pivots along the way. I think that both from an educational perspective, from a teaching perspective, this allows us to teach product in an entirely different way, where you can literally be told by a partner, hey, we want you to run this, put this on the shelf, identify who our target market is, invite them into the space, incentivize them, collect their user feedback, and then give us those insights back in a way that is actionable.”
Watch the video featuring Dr. Westlake’s presentation of the Shift Retail Lab from TMRE 2024.
