During last week’s European SME Week, JA-YE (Junior Achievement Young Enterprise) and the European Commission  launched the education  campaign ’Your World – Your Buiness’ to inspire school students across Europe to become responsible entrepreneurs. “If you want to save the world, become an entrepreneur”, was how Tom Dodd from DG Enterprise summarised the mission of the campaign during a press conference. ’Entrepreneurs are the world´s change makers. They are responsible for innovations.  And they need to take more responsibility in society”.

It’s easy to say, but how do we attract more youngsters to pursue social and environmental business ideas?  Well, we probably need to start pretty early to shape the attitudes of the next generation of business people, which leads us to focus on schools. This is why DG Enterprise is collaborating in this campaign with JA-YE – the largest student network organisation in Europe,  to address entrepreneurialism in schools. Offering targeted education programmes for different age groups, JA-YE together with employees from established enterprises like HP has been teaching students to become successful in business for several  years.

But this is only one side of the story. Financial success is of course key for any entrepreneur to survive in global competition. But how can an entrepreneur come up with a successful and sexy business idea that is fun and also helps to successfully differentiate a company?  This is where values and social and environmental business aspects come into the equation.

Working with JA-YE, HP launched the ’HP Responsible Business Competition’ in 2006 to motivate more students to develop responsible business ideas and to award best practices. On a yearly basis, the most exciting student ideas are selected as part of an online competition and during a European competition. So far more than 60,000 students have participated in the competition. Together with other successful young entrepreneurs, the winners of the 2008 HP Responsible Business Competition  were invited to Brussels last week to present their business idea to an EU audience.

The first best practices are in place but, as part of the campaign, the EU is of course looking for many more. This is why in the coming weeks an education package for teachers, including a brochure and video materials available in 24 languages, will be distributed to 60,000+ schools across Europe. Following the teaching exercises at schools, students will be asked to participate in the Responsible Business Competition to be awarded for their most responsible ideas.

It is pretty inspirational and definitely entrepreneurial that the European Commission launched the  campaign ’Your World - Your Business’ last week. Such out-of-the-box thinking from the Commission is required to highlight positive aspects of doing business and to further strengthen Europe’s competitiveness in a challenging economic environment, where entrepreneurs are pressured even more to preserve and create jobs.

Congratulations to the Commission and to JA-YE for launching this excellent campaign! We are keen to get additional comments on this approach and of course to further raise awareness. Now it’s your turn!

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA