Villagers in Tibet Autonomous Region will benefit from an eight-week project by Master of Business Administration (MBA) students from the United States.

The group of eight students from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University came up with tourism promotions, marketing strategies for local handicrafts, and educational and employment surveys for Tibetan youngsters in the Kham area on the border of Tibet Autonomous Region, Sichuan Province and Yunnan Province.

"It's the best experience I have ever had," Adam Carley, one of the group members from the United Kingdom, told Shanghai Daily while in the city yesterday.

"I have been thinking about many things we learnt in (the MBA) class, but it definitely shook up the way we did things... we need to be practical," he explained.

Assisting local residents with their tourism promotion plans was one of the highlights of the study trip, students said, as they investigated tourism resources in the small but old village with thousands of years of history. Just 30 families live there now.

To test tourism routes and services they designed, students interviewed backpackers and package tourists and took them on a pilot one-night tour to collect their feedback.

Meanwhile, business management training for handicraft artists was another success.

Students designed and gave business workshops for 40-plus artists, teaching them basics about market analysis, marketing skills, pricing, and guidelines for exporting Tibetan handicrafts to Western countries. All the project outcomes will be collected by Kham Aid Foundation, a US-based non-government organization, for further improvement before the foundation applies the schemes, according to Kevin Jiang, one of the Chinese students and a Tongji University graduate.

Students will also be responsible for writing business study cases for Kellogg after returning to the United States.

(Shanghai Daily September 3, 2007)