Students in a business communications course have to find a white paper and critique it. Ordinarily we wouldn’t have a problem finding government white papers or white papers that cover social or political issues but in this case students are looking for white papers of a different sort, what the Wikipedia calls “commercial white papers“. They define these as documents used by businesses as a marketing tool to advertise the benefits of a particular product or technology.
Examples can be found by doing some creative searching with Google. Combine the term “white paper’ with the name of a company. Try it out with Apple or Cisco or Factiva or LexisNexis. You could also combine “white paper” with terms like marketing, managment, operations or technology. The Direct Marketing Association, Network World and TechRepublic all have white papers on their websites.