Since Junior Achievement (JA) was started nearly 90 years ago student competitions have been core to the JA experience.  They have provided hundreds of thousands of students the opportunity to deepen their JA classroom experience, test their skills and knowledge, measure themselves against others, get a glimpse into their own potential success in the real world, and to make and meet friends from outside their own community.

The HP Responsible Business Competition is making a difference in the community by emphasizing the importance of social responsibility as an integral element of business, entrepreneurship and competition. I was particularly impressed to see how many students take the social and environmental aspects into consideration when they create their own student companies. The competition consists of two strands – an online ideas competition that rewards the best responsible business idea and the HP Responsible Business Awards, where JA-YE student companies that have been entered for the JA-YE Europe Company of the Year are acknowledged if their business has been set up and run what we call ‘responsibly’. This year we received more than 200 applications for the online business ideas contest and several of the 33 student companies participating in the JA-YE Europe Company of the Year Competition included aspects related to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into their business plans.

More than 62,120 16-18 year old European students participated in the HP Responsible Business Competition over the last 2 years and 172 HP employees have been involved with mentoring student businesses and providing more insight into how social and environmental responsibility is part of doing business at a global market-leading company like HP.

The relationship between HP and JA-YE in Europe has grown tremendously in the last 5 years. Now in more than 20 countries, the partnership is a ‘best practice’ in CSR. There are many facets to the partnership and therefore many entry points for stakeholders. The signature HP Responsible Business project has created a unique European dimension to all the activities taking place on the ground.  Taking up the highly topical theme of “responsible business”, HP and JA-YE created a classroom case-study module for HP employees to present in multiple locations in 14 countries. An online contest gives JA-YE’s Company Program students a chance to test their responsible business knowledge as well as present their responsible business ideas to an HP jury. The contestants at the JA-YE Europe Company of the Year Competition can win the HP Responsible Business Award.

At this year’s finals in Stockholm HP has selected the student team “Infotainment” from Austria as the winner of the 2008 HP Responsible Business Award for their concept to educate 8- to10-year-old students, their parents and teachers on environmental topics like climate change. The winning student company has educated more than 500 school students with the help of workshop modules, easy-to-understand environmental stories and games summarized in a booklet used to raise the interest of students, teachers and parents in environmental topics, while at the same time establishing a profitable business. This example shows that responsible business ideas can have a pretty early start.  What an excellent experience for the future lives of our young generation.

Diana Filip, Director of Development and Marketing, JA-YE Europe

The winning team from Austria:

Impressions from the conference: