At the end of last week I attended the European Academy in Society (EABIS) Annual Colloquium at Cranfield University where HP and Ashridge Business School jointly launched the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award. The Award is an essay competition aimed at MBA and other postgraduate students across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and is organised by Ashridge in collaboration with EABIS and supported by us and WWF.

The aim of the competition is to find the best ideas from management and other post-graduate students about how organisations can innovate to create value from the shift to a low carbon economy. The theme builds nicely on the work that we've been doing with WWF in EMEA over the past year around how IT can assist the shift to a low carbon economy. We support this Award because we want to bring our work to the academic world by encouraging students to change their mindset from seeing climate change as a risk, to seeing it as a business opportunity.

During the coming months, WWF plans to visit 10 universities across the region to promote this Award. These visits can range from stand alone events to lectures and learning sessions that can be integrated directly into educational programmes. Dennis Pamlin, Global Policy Advisor, WWF will be the one to visit the universities and as you can read on his blog, he's already looking forward to it.

We're really excited about collaborating with our three partners on this project and are looking forward to receiving essays from students about different areas of innovation. We've also created a Facebook page where students can connect with each other and start a discussion. This page can only be as good as users will make it, so if you are interested in the topic of the Award, join us on Facebook and help us start the discussion. To find us on Facebook, search for “Ashridge Award”.

I'll keep you updated on further developments with this project on our blog. To find out more about eligibility, deadlines, the high profile jury and our thoughts on the award theme, visit www.ashridge.org.uk/SustainableInnovation.

Let me know what you think about this initiative and leave a comment below.

Ulrike Haug; CSR Communications; HP EMEA