Josh Eckman began his university experience as an engineering student. Then like a lot of University of Utah undergrads he shifted, deciding that dual degrees in business administration and Asian studies were more to his liking.

So he transferred to the U.'s David Eccles School of Business, and that's where his world was knocked sideways -- in a good way.

Eckman became part of the a growing emphasis at the nationally renowned school to bring students -- at undergrad and graduate levels alike -- out of sterile lecture halls and into the real world of business.

Some students are encouraged to form real companies, not imaginary ones dreamed up as a class exercise; other students, such as those in marketing, create corporate campaigns judged and often assimilated by national advertising agencies and public-relations firms; still others who study accounting work face-to-face with real people desperate to untangle problems with the Internal Revenue Service.

"The typical student wants to get a job as soon as possible," said Jack Brittain, the former dean of the business school who is now vice president of technology venture development in offices on the U.'s upper campus at Fort Douglas.

"I saw the wonderful power of ... students doing fieldwork while taking classes. It makes all their classes far more relevant," he said, adding it also gives them real-world experience on which to hang their resumes when they go after post-graduation jobs.

Eckman's experience, over a period of six years, underscores the school's ascent into this style of education.

In his junior year, he took classes at the Lassonde New Venture Development Center, which is allied with the Eccles school. He studied how to create companies to develop, produce and sell new technology -- technology developed by U. scientists and engineers who typically have little business savvy. There, he saw how graduate students teamed up with research faculty from across the campus to help researchers take their discoveries to the marketplace.

The result? Eckman wrapped up his double major, went back to his former college to get a master's degree in mechanical engineering, latched onto a research project developed by engineering professor Bruce Gale and re-entered the Lassonde Center ready to strike gold.

"The Lassonde Center usually assigns a technology to a student," said Eckman, 29. "I brought the technology with me, they assigned students to me, and we wrote a business plan. We formed a company and looked for federal grant money."

The company -- Wasatch Microfluidics -- was born in 2005. Based in a former hospital building on the north end of 300 West in Salt Lake City, Eckman is its president. The product, originally conceived on Gale's U. laboratory benchtop, is a microchip-sized device that holds biological fluids -- blood, protein, DNA samples -- in channels the width of a human hair. Such a tiny format allows hundreds of tests to be performed on each sample, doing away with the need for larger volumes of material now usually contained, say, in medical-lab test tubes.

"By the time I came out of business school, I had a wealth of hands-on, versus classroom, experience," Eckman said. "We're in a growing field with many years of growth and discovery still left."

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Entrepreneurship institutionalized » The program that provided the fertile ground for Eckman and other student entrepreneurs at the Lassonde Center was formalized in 2005 under the new post of vice president for technology venture development. Brittain is the first academic to hold that senior university position -- a post he held for four years while he also served as Eccles School of Business dean. "He had two full-time jobs," one colleague asserted.

Brittain was a natural for the post because the vice president job grew out of his efforts during his 10 - year stretch as dean to push students into real-word settings.

"I started imagining and thinking about whole programs being integrated that way."

That real-world view led to blasting apart the traditional model of "learning in isolation," he said.

Brittain left as dean in July to devote full time to the vice president's post, and management professor Taylor Randall, on the faculty since 1999, took over. A third-generation business professor at the U. -- grandfather Clyde Randall was dean; his father, Reed Randall, was a professor of accounting -- the new dean said his task is to continue that student integration into the real world while also facing a movement to "redefine what it means to have a U. business degree."

"There are a number of forces affecting academics, pushing for a need and desire for lower-cost education," he said.

Some institutions, for example, offer education via the Internet, "but you don't get interaction with students that way; students cannot grow by working together in teams," he said. It's not an approach he champions.

"We can hang our hat on technology and technology development," he said, pointing to the work being done through the Lassonde Center. At the same time, numerous programs encompassing forays out of the ivory tower exist for those students not following the entrepreneurial path.

The school's early adoption of nontraditional MBA programs are examples of this drive to open its offerings to people in the workplace who work full time but still want to earn an advanced degree. The Executive MBA program is conducted through weekend classes; the Professional MBA program takes place at night.

Traditional students in both undergraduate and graduate programs have a number of choices for real-world experiences. For example, the school has an $18 million venture-fund program in which 30 to 40 students review 60 to 80 proposals a year presented by businesses seeking venture capital. The fund is financed by "a series of big banks and high net-worth individuals," said Randall, "who are interested in educating students how to evaluate business opportunities, but who also want a return on their money.

"The students do the leg work, and if a national firm decides to invest in one of their recommendations, all we ask is to get a piece of it with them -- and those returns fund our program."

Another program, funded at about $100,000, allows students to learn about the stock market by actually investing in companies.

"So far, they've beaten the S&P [Standard & Poors stock index], and they still have their principal intact," said Randall. "The fact that you are responsible for returns certainly changes the game."

Students also have placed high in national marketing and advertising competitions in which they conduct campaigns for real companies that actually use their work, he pointed out.

"The momentum here is remarkable."

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Learning in the real world » Graduate student Jarum Feichko feels that momentum daily as an associate at the Lassonde Center. There, he is helping form a company to market a potential product developed to screen drug interactions.

"This is real life as it comes at you," said the 29-year-old second-year MBA candidate. "We're in teams of three. We find out who the competitors are, where you fit in the production chain. We do market analysis, come up with a business model, go after venture capital, and then we'll launch it as a company in the spring.

"It may require a lot of attention" once that happens, "or it may be better to spin it off and sell it to another company. There's a real potential here for us to make money."

His post-graduate plans include the possibility of staying on with the start-up as a board member. His specialty is operations management.

Feichko decided, after completing a double major in marketing and finance, to stay at the U. for his graduate degree rather that go to a school with a more prestigious name, such as Wharton, Stanford or Brown.

"I wanted an environment where I could get hands-on training in running a business, and the U. provided that," he said.

James Carroll, 22, a senior in marketing and information systems, thinks he will take a few years off before launching his foray into graduate school. He has one more challenge before getting his bachelor's next spring: finding an internship.

"It's still a tough economy. One week it will look positive and then I'll get an e-mail saying it's on hold."

He's had a wealth of experience through student competitions that involve developing marketing programs for such national companies as Kodak and McGraw Hill, and for Provo-based Omniture.

"These companies let us look at their tools. We wrote full marketing plans for them and created PowerPoint presentations," he said.

"You can't beat that kind of experience."

jkeahey@sltrib.com