Name Gary Marple | ||
Gary Andre Marple (born February 22, 1937) is a technology entrepreneur with a background in management consulting. Most recently a founding partner and chief inventor of text-to-speech software firm Lessac Technologies, Inc. (LTI), Marple was a management consultant for twenty years with Arthur D. Little (ADL) and then founded and operated the consulting firm of Commonwealth Strategies, Inc. (CSI) prior to his work with LTI.
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Education
Gary A. Marple holds an MBA and a DBA in economics and social psychology, and was an MIT post-doctoral Fellow. He did his undergraduate work at Drake University, his graduate work at Michigan State University, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He was president (1958–59) of the Drake University chapter of Delta Sigma Pi, a member of the Drake University chapter of the honorary fraternity Beta Gamma Sigma, and a member of the Michigan State University chapter of the honorary fraternity Phi Kappa Phi.
Arthur D. Little
Marple’s professional life began and grew over nearly twenty years at Arthur D. Little (ADL), the firm that pioneered in research and development management consulting. The firm practiced Matrix management, with each professional staff member reporting to both a general manager and a project manager. ADL was preeminent in operations research, computer science, economic development, technology development, and life sciences. When Marple left in 1982 to start a new firm, he was Manager of ADL’s Strategic Marketing Practice. He worked with early computer programming and he has followed the development of this field in his work.
Marple twice headed the Strategic Marketing group at ADL’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices. During his time with ADL, between 1963–1982, he managed teams of experts and specialists to achieve strategic outcomes in the automotive industry and the educational publishing industry as well as other situations and industries, including travel/leisure, personal computers, beverages, and hand-tools. His market research expertise lay in creating perception, opinion, and revealed trade-off utility methods for companies to use (1) in identifying and developing new products and services and then (2) for overseeing their design and engineering implementation in order to deliver the highest perceived value to the largest grouping of existing and potential customers.
In the automotive industry work, Marple specialized in identifying and measuring consumers’ unmet needs and wants, finding the largest numbers of persons/households sharing similar unmet needs and wants. Two examples of products that eventually evolved from these studies were the minivan (eventually brought out by Chrysler, though the initial study was done under a contract with Nissan) and the 4-door pickup truck (brought out by Nissan). Examples of consumer-driven product improvements that gave significant competitive advantages to brands offering them within an existing product category included anti-skid braking systems, all-wheel-drive, and automatic transmissions with “manual” over-ride so all four or five gears could be selected independently.
In the educational publishing industry work, Marple oversaw the first quantitative studies of teacher preferences and benefits from instructional elements such as program scope & sequence and instructional guidelines. In an effort culminating in Academic American Encyclopedia, he conducted market feasibility studies for a first electronically prepared and computerized encyclopedia, then involved a management team to present an investment proposal to United Dutch Publishers (VNU) that continues today as a 21-volume, heavily cross-referenced product made famous by Grolier, later owned by the Scholastic Corporation.
Commonwealth Strategies
Marple’s work with Commonwealth Strategies, Inc. (CSI), which he founded in 1982, included, as at ADL, managing teams of experts and specialists to achieve strategic outcomes for clients. He advised start-up CEOs and actively participated in seed and early stage ventures. He advised to M&H Group (Chuck Halbower and Jana Matthews) and eCent (Christine Adamow). He served for several years as Executive in Residence at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation#Entrepreneurship’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. On some projects he brought in independent consultant colleagues Ellen Metcalf, Richard Lamontagne, and Thomas Anderson as their backgrounds and skills applied.
Lessac Technologies
Marple co-founded Lessac Technologies, Inc. (LTI) with his colleague H. Donald Wilson in 2001. He was the chief inventor of the company’s unique text-to-speech software, and in 2007 became Chairman and Chief Technology Officer. Currently (May 2012) LTI is developing unique text-to-speech (TTS) software that provides near-human expressiveness when digital text is the sole input. It was Marple’s idea to use computational linguistics to provide prosodic models and pronunciations for speech synthesis and recognition based on speech utterances produced by actors trained according to Arthur Lessac’s methods for expressive stage performances.
Publication
While earning his PhD, Marple co-authored with Stanley C. Hollander a publication titled ‘’Henry Ford: Inventor of the supermarket?‘’ This publication described how Henry Ford applied production-line methods he had invented for automobile production to the service of improving the efficiency of grocery stores. Ford started his own grocery stores but decided to close them when delivery companies complained and threatened to stop using Fords as their delivery vehicles, since by then they had a choice and could use other brands. Still, many of Ford’s efficiencies became associated with supermarket chains in later years.
Instructor
Marple twice instructed at the college level (teaching assistant at Michigan State while getting his doctorate, and in the early 1980s a course in marketing management at Boston University), and while with Arthur D. Little conducted professional seminars in Europe and the U.S.
Corporate Officer and Trustee Roles
Alongside his regular consulting work, Marple held from 1988 to 1998 the offices of Treasurer and Secretary in a venture with Charles C. Bragg called Air Services Division, Inc., which provided aircraft inspection services and custom charter flights out of Minuteman Airfield in Stow, Massachusetts, and then later moved to Worcester Municipal Airport and added customer charter flights.
Marple held from 1996 to 2002 the office of President in a venture with Geoffrey J. Schmidt called Answer Pharmaceutical Corp., which was set up to capitalize on research by Schmidt (using blood samples collected from a population of nurses over a period of time) to develop screening diagnostics, searching for the biomarkers in blood that were associated with significant incidences of certain kinds of cancer over a twenty-year time span.
Since 1958 Marple has been a member, and one year President, of the nonprofit Dundee Ski Club, Inc., organized in 1950 to oversee a certain plot of land and cabin in North Conway, New Hampshire, as an affordable place to take members’ families for ski trips in that area.
He was a Trustee for the Linden Hill School, a nonprofit middle school for boys with dyslexia and other learning differences, from 1999 to 2005.
Since 1999 he has been a Trustee of Arts|Learning (formerly National Arts and Learning Collaborative at Walnut Hill), which seeks to integrate visual arts, dance, theater, and music into traditional academic classroom curricula, and to offer arts as educational curricula in their own right through arts integration.
He served for several years as Treasurer and was on the Board of the Bearded Collie Club of America (BCCA). As a member of the BCCA, he managed their National Specialty in 1998, held that year in Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was President of the Minuteman chapter.
VanderWyk & Burnham
In 2003 Marple purchased the independent small press VanderWyk & Burnham (V&B), operated and originally founded in 1994 by his wife Meredith Rutter, rather than see it dissolved by the bank that had seized the assets of the parent company (Massachusetts company Publicom, Inc., founded by Rutter in 1985). Learning that the bank had no plans to keep the small press in business, Marple and Rutter determined that the V&B inventory and the goodwill embodied and engendered therein made it a feasible risk for them to take on, with Rutter providing the operational oversight as publisher. In 2009, after the publication of several more books, including one titled Front of the Class that led to a Hallmark Hall of Fame production based on it, Marple and Rutter agreed to sell V&B to Quick Publishing, a small press in St. Louis, Missouri.
Personal life
Gary A. Marple was born February 22, 1937, to Truma Janice (Cook) Marple and Kenneth Lowry Marple in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Younger siblings are Kenneth J. Marple, Virginia Marple (Strickler), and John Marple. Gary was married three times: first to Sandra King in 1955, and they had two sons, Brian E. Marple and Stephen L. Marple; second to Ellen Metcalf in 1970; third to Meredith Rutter in 1988.
He is a scuba diver, a downhill skier, and a fly fishing fan. Raised in a family where hunting was part of life and then as an adult holding dear the promise of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, he is currently (May 2012) licensed to carry concealed in 4 states with reciprocal rights in 26 more states. He is a multi-engine instrument-rated aviator and survivor of burns over 35% of his body when his single-engine Grumman American AA-5 Tiger was caught in a wind shear during a landing at Minuteman Airfield in 1985.
From 1991 to 2010 he raised two bearded collies while learning about dog breeding and dog showmanship, taking Walkoway’s (Chris Walkowicz’s Walkoway Kennel’s) J. C. Superstar (“Duncan”) and Walkoway-Briton’s Qantas (“Thistle”) to championship status, and also a herding title for Qantas (“Thistle”).