CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : GET-IT

GET-IT Networking conference: Immersive Learning!

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:24:00 GMT

This was just so amazing and very rewarding. On 16 and 17 October we held our second GET-IT networking conference in Cairo, Egypt. The conference was hosted by the Ministry of ICT in the ‘smart village’. We had representatives from 80 GET-IT centres, government organisations and educational institutions, as well as real entrepreneurs - our success stories - and they came from about 20 EMEA countries. We all joined hands during the conference and made the theme of the conference – Immersive Learning – a reality.

What did we do? The aim of the conference was to bring together delegates from our GET-IT centres, leaders from education and government and HP management, to exchange experiences, share best practices and get the latest updates on our GET-IT programme. This conference enabled participants to grow their own GET-IT network and learn from each other.

A real highlight for me was to see what GET-IT can achieve when we all come together and the impact that our GET-IT training clearly has on students and the local economy. Another highlight was hearing from entrepreneurs who spoke about how they were able to build their business or improve their economic situation as a result of their GET-IT training.

For instance, we heard from Aissatel Amet from France. She said that she had wanted to establish her own business as a web designer but she lacked sufficient knowledge in Excel programming and numbers. Her GET-IT training helped her to develop her knowledge and ability and she has now successfully launched her own business. These are moments that warm your heart.

The huge amount of work that went into organising this event was also a big highlight for me. It was clearly evident that the Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), the Suzanne Mubarak Peace Movement Foundation (one of our GET-IT partners in Egypt), United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and of course HP really worked so hard and so well together. It was amazing. In addition to sharing experiences and best practice, we also provided our delegates and NGO partners with the latest developments of the GET-IT programme, specifically focusing on our online extension of the programme.

For example, in future the GET-IT centres will have the opportunity to get engaged in curriculum developments online and will be able to suggest topics of interest. Also, we have just launched our second serious game on the online GET-IT City platform. It is called GET-IT Blossom and it represents an extension of our existing online training platform GET-IT City.

GET-IT Blossom is an interactive training programme where the player is a manager of a flower business. The player has to make sure that his customers are happy, the turnover increases and the plantation and office-related work are run successfully.

It was so motivating and rewarding to see how the centres shared their experiences and engaged so well in ‘immersive learning’. To see how GET-IT helps students on a local level makes me feel very strong about our programme and I can’t wait to grow the scope and impact of this programme even further. We have made a lot of contacts within the centres and a number of governments are now really interested in growing GET-IT.

As you will remember from earlier blogs, GET-IT focuses a lot on online learning. This is why we made sure that the conference could also be accessed online to enable people who could not attend the conference in Cairo to participate from their own vantage point. They could do this, for instance, via our GET-IT Facebook page or our Twitter page and of course our GET-IT Homepage. You can find more information about the conference on all of those pages.

I would like to finish my blog entry by extending a big thank you to everyone who participated in the conference. Thank you for all of your contributions, your trust and your work. Let me also thank our partners, the Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute for all their hard work in helping to organise the conference, as well as to the Ministry of ICT and the Suzanne Mubarak Women´s International Peace Movement for hosting us and for their support both before and during the event. Chapeau!

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investment, EMEA

PS: you can find recent news about GET-IT on our homepage, our video or latest case study.

Conference on 'Arab Women in Science and Technology' in Dubai

jeanne2007 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:39:00 GMT

It is always very rewarding to get insights into different cultures and to learn from them. Last week I had the opportunity to present at the first women´s conference of the Arab Science and Technology Foundation in Dubai.

The conference should probably be regarded as a historical moment. It was the first time that female researchers from different Arab countries have come together to exchange experiences in professional development and to discuss the most burning issues relating to business success. Even if many women are capable of overcoming cultural, religious and political constraints so that they can pursue their own careers, there is still a long way to go to bringing more women into decision-making positions.

In Saudi Arabia, for example, 60 per cent of students are female, but only 1.3 per cent of women are board members of major companies. What happens to all these highly qualified women when they leave university?!

Looking at the unemployment rates of graduates in the Middle East, the percentage of women is extraordinarily high. So there we are. There is obviously still a barrier to hiring qualified women for respective positions. It is interesting to see that, in Dubai, it is still common practice for job advertisements to state a preference for men. Women don’t even seem to get a chance to apply.

Whilst in Dubai, I had an opportunity to talk to some of our partners from our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training programme, including the Dubai Women´s College. I learned that there seems to be a greater demand for women to be more highly qualified in the use of technology and a greater need to help them set up their own businesses. What an excellent opportunity! I have been very pleased to see that, through our GET-IT programme we can obviously make a good contribution.

Talking to ‘Young Entrepreneurs in Dubai’, an organisation supported by the Dubai government to significantly increase the number of entrepreneurs over the next couple of years, the response has been similar. Jobs that, in the past, were made available by the government will not be funded in a similar way in the future. It seems as though graduates from universities now need to take much more personal responsibility for their future careers. And entrepreneurship is one of the answers - especially for women.

I very much hope that the Arab Science and Technology Foundation will be able to maintain the inspiring momentum of the conference and that they will continue to support women researchers in their career development. The heat is on and congratulations to all women in this region who are already on their way.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

GET-IT growth in Africa and the Middle East

Daniela.Opp — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:57:00 GMT

Since May last year we have been working with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) to grow our GET-IT programme in Africa and the Middle East. GET-IT is part of HP’s social investment strategy aimed at innovating teaching and learning to help young entrepreneurs achieve success in their future careers. The programme provides IT equipment, a cash donation, IT training and also ‘train-the-trainer’ sessions for trainers from our respective local partner organisations.

So far, HP and its partners have rolled the GET-IT programme out to nearly 100 centres in 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reaching more than 43,000 people through online and offline training courses. The plan is to grow GET-IT even further to reach over 500,000 young people by end of 2010.

I am happy to tell you that we are now opening another 20 new GET-IT centres in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The centres will be in Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. This figure more than doubles our GET-IT community in Africa and the Middle East.

The need for IT and entrepreneurship education in these regions is particularly high. UNIDO constitutes a strong partner for HP and has done an excellent job in selecting our GET-IT partners in Africa and the Middle East. You can find the list of our new partners in Africa and the Middle East here.

Our partner MEA-I will be holding ‘train-the trainer’ sessions for the trainers of our new GET-IT partner organisations over the next three months. The sessions are called ‘Guidance Courses’. They are held over five days and offer instructor-led, classroom-based and high interactive training, incorporating experiential learning methodologies.

The goal of this course is to provide trainers with the foundations in technical and facilitation skills and the knowledge required to conduct the GET-IT curriculum and training for students. Moving forward, we are looking to bring parts of the ‘train-the-trainer’ sessions online in due course.

I will soon be able to update you with other great new developments with the programme, starting with advanced online tools and games through to our annual networking conference which be held in October. So, stay tuned for more information on our flagship progamme GET-IT.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investment EMEA

GET-IT: Africa highlights

Daniela.Opp — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:51:00 GMT

I have already written a couple of entries about our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training in IT (GET-IT) Programme. Since its launch in 2007 we have opened up 100 centres in 30 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa and have already trained more than 43,000 students. We recently published an article about three GET-IT centres in Africa in our Global Citizenship Bulletin. Instead of repeating the article, I would like to encourage you to read it here. It shows you the experiences and impressions of three different NGOs which offer our GET-IT programme. Each one is different, but they all have the same goal: To teach young school leavers and undergraduates business skills with IT. Happy reading.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, EMEA

European SME Week: JA-YE and European Commission launch campaign for young entrepreneurs

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:58:00 GMT

I would quickly like to draw your attention to this year’s European Small and Medium Entrepreneurship Week in Brussels which is taking place now up until 14 May. During the European SME week there will be over 1000 events in over 35 countries. You cannot miss it.

My colleague Jeannette Weisschuh was attending one of the events yesterday: the launch of the initiative ’Your World, Your Business’. This initiative was developed by the European Commission and Junior Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe to encourage young people to become creative, dynamic and responsible entrepreneurs of the future. You can find additional information on ’Your World, Your Business’ here.

Students participating in the ’Your World, Your Business’ campaign are asked to submit their ideas to the JA-YE Europe and HP ’Responsible Business Competition ’. Through this competition we want to encourage young people to consider social and environmental responsibility as they build their own small enterprises. Last year’s winner, the Austrian student company Infotainment , were on hand at yesterday’s launch to share their experiences with the audience. Students can submit their business ideas at www.responsible-business.org/europe/.

I strongly believe that, in the current economic climate, entrepreneurs are even more important for job preservation and creation. We should try to support entrepreneurship wherever we can. Another one of our social investment programmes, the HP Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT) does exactly that. We specifically target young graduates and unemployed youth to join the programme so that they can learn how IT can help them in building their own business.

Have you been to the SME Week? We would love to hear what you think about it.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, HP EMEA

New Global Citizenship Report now available!

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:12:00 GMT

I have exciting news: our new Global Citizenship Report is now available and you can read it online. Within the report, you will find lots of information about our 2008 achievements in the areas of ethics and compliance; human rights and labour practices; environmental sustainability; and privacy and social investment.

The Global Citizenship Report details great environmental highlights including:

Did you know that our HP Deskjet D2545 Printer is made nearly completely out of recycled plastic material?
Did you know that we reported on the greenhouse gas emissions of our first tier suppliers?
Did you know that we have recycled around 1.71 billion pounds of electronic products and supplies to date? This constitutes nearly the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge… Amazing.

It is clear that we’re on track to meet our recycling goal: two billion pounds by the end of 2010. Read more about our environmental achievements here.

I don’t want to reveal too much, but as Manager of Social Investment in EMEA, allow me to share with you two of our Social Investment achievements in 2008:

We continued our partnership with Junio Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE), extending the HP Responsible Business Competition to several countries in Africa and the Middle East. The joint HP JA-YE programme has now reached over 42,000 JA-YE students in 14 countries. In 2008, more than 120 HP employees have supported the students by giving them advice on how to run a business responsibly and successfully. Read more in the new Global Citizenship report and case study
HP contributed $5.8 million to foster entrepreneurship, including opening 35 new GET-IT training centres in EMEA. We have now doubled the number of GET-IT centres, with a presence in 27 countries, and have trained over 25,000 students. Read more in the Global Citizenship Report and on our GET-IT Webpage.

I hope I’ve managed to entice you to find out more. To read our Global Citizenship Report, click here. We have also launched a customer version of the report for Europe, the Middle East and Africa which you can access here. It is worth checking out.

I am looking forward hearing your feedback.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, HP EMEA

New podcast: Promote entrepreneurial spirit

jeanne2007 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:00:00 GMT

As you know from former entries, we have many GET-IT centres across Europe, the Middle East and Africa that offer under - or unemployed young graduates with business and IT skills which will help them to find jobs. We recently talked to Erik Dauwen, Director of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship Belgium who is in charge of a GET-IT centre in Belgium. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

Fight social and environmental exclusion: The e-inclusion Ministerial Conference

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:11:00 GMT

At the beginning of December I had the opportunity to participate in the e-inclusion Ministerial and Expo in Vienna, where HP was one of the main sponsors. HP presented our latest accessibility products and showed some great solutions on web accessibility. We integrate accessibility into our HP products and website development process in order to improve user experience. This is accomplished by buttons identified by touch, ports and switches positioned within easy reach and also large adjustable displays.

The event is organized on an annual basis by the European Commission. This year there were 90 exhibition stands, more than 130 speakers and nearly 1500 delegates who all talked about or presented their approach on how information and communication technologies can fight social and economic exclusion.

The conference focused on bringing together many actors of civil society, the economy and the government to exchange their knowledge and best practices, to honour best practices (e-inclusion awards) and to create a discussion forum about different initiatives and the way forward. The exhibition area constituted a great pool of existing approaches and ideas and it was exciting to see what’s already out there.

This is the second year that we have participated in this event. We had one exhibition stand where I presented our GET-IT programme, which aims at fostering entrepreneurship among young graduates aged between 16-25 in Europe, Middle East and Africa. I presented details on our newly launched GET-IT City portal, which allows us to reach students beyond the classroom. The portal gives students access to training and enables them to receive useful tips for establishing an enterprise. Students can learn IT and important business skills in an entertaining way, with online games and videos. Click here to get your own impression about GET-IT City and let me know what you think.

In addition to our exhibition stand, the lead for our organization, Gabriele Zedlmayer, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Global Citizenship, Hewlett Packard, Europe, Middle East and Africa, delivered a keynote speech about digital literacy. Gabi made it clear that technology access is a key factor in bridging the digital divide. But access is not enough: eSkills are needed to participate in the information society.

I really enjoyed some very fruitful conversations with many important HP stakeholders. Through these discussions I gleaned more ideas on how we can make our social investments even more relevant to society.

Daniela Opp, Manager, Social Investment and Economic Development

2008 – strong partnerships are a key success factor

jeanne2007 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:10:00 GMT

Wow, time goes by quickly! As I look back on an exciting year, I would like to review some highlights of CSR at HP EMEA and I would also be keen to hear about your 2008 highlights. I think we can be particularly proud of what we have achieved with our partners in the areas of education and environment this year.

We have worked with WWF for more than a year now to investigate how information and communication technology (ICT) can help to combat climate change. This summer we published the ‘Low Carbon IT Solutions’ guide which summarises how carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can be reduced by using HP products.

A second environmental highlight is our e-waste project in Africa. ICT products can help to reduce carbon emissions but, at the end of their lifecycle, reuse or recycling is a critical factor in reducing the environmental burden. During the year we joined forces with the Global Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF), the Swiss Institute for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) and Recover-e-Alliance, Wasteplan and the Salesian Institute to investigate state-of-the-art recycling practices of electronic equipment and to evaluate further methods of how recycling processes can be approved. This is an exciting project and I hope to share updates with you early next year.

Talking about Africa, I would also like to highlight our collaboration with UNESCO. We have been working with UNESCO for a couple of years to alleviate brain drain in Africa. My colleage Arnaud introduced you to this programme some time ago. We are working with five universities in Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe to connect researchers who have left Africa with researchers who are still on the African continent to exchange knowledge and foster relationships.

Let me turn to our education highlights, which are also the result of strong partnerships. Our GET-IT (Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT) programme has really flourished in 2008. In addition to a successful partnership with MEA-I, we have also been working with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) since May to expand our GET-IT programme in Africa. With such a strong and reliable partner at hand, I am sure we can provide a lot of young graduates in African countries with useful business and IT skills which will help them to establish their own small enterprises and develop their job careers.

In the Autumn we successfully organised our first annual GET-IT conference in Brussels. As Daniela has summarized, the conference was a great success and we received valuable feedback from GET-IT participants, our partners and local non-governmental organisations. We have set high targets regarding GET-IT for the coming year. I am eager to reach all of them and I promise to share our achievements with you.

These are just a few of our highlights for 2008. If you would like to read more about our 2008 achievements, please go here.

I hope you have enjoyed our blogs in 2008 and I would like to invite you to send me any suggestions of what you would like to read more about in 2009.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

GET-IT programme extended to e-learning portal and new centres

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:05:00 GMT

Today, we officially launched the latest component of our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT) programme, which is a web portal called GET-IT City! We also announced our 2009 plans to extend the programme to an additional 30 training centres in Africa, the Middle East and Russia to help address the high levels of youth unemployment in these markets.

If you have followed our latest blog entries you will know that GET-IT is one of our major social investment flagship programmes in EMEA. Briefly, GET-IT aims to help young people enter into professional life and, in many cases, it helps them launch their own businesses. Collectively, this helps to reduce youth unemployment. Working with our non-profit partners, we have trained 8,755 students since launching the programme in 2007. Approximately 60 per cent of students attending the GET-IT training have been able to find a job as a result.

Our newly launched virtual city provides young unemployed people and graduates with a fun way to learn IT and business skills through online games and video clips. You can find out more about the GET-IT City in our interview with Jelena Godjevac, CEO of Micro-Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), our partner for the GET-IT programme.

At the moment, we deliver GET-IT training in 70 centres across 25 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and we have another 30 centres in the pipeline. The new centres and online portal combined will serve to enhance those trainings, enabling us to reach as many as 500,000 students by 2010. We are also considering to integrate the games from the portal in other initiatives, e.g. our HP Responsible Business Competition, which is another social investment flagship programme developed with JA-YE.

Let me know what you think of the online portal and the games.

Daniela Opp, Social Investments and Economic Development, HP EMEA

Today is Blog Action Day

jeanne2007 — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:11:00 GMT

Today is Blog Action Day which this year is dedicated to Poverty. Bloggers around the world have signed up to blog about this important and comprehensive topic.

Three bloggers, Collis Ta'eed, Leo Babauta and Cyan Ta'eed, launched Blog Action Day on 15th October 2007. Last year’s theme was on The Environment and we participated with our own blog entry.

We want to join Blog Action Day again this year, together with around 9,000 bloggers who have already signed up.

I looked up a few statistics to prepare for our Blog Action Day entry and found some rather depressing facts.

Poverty Facts and Stats: Did you know that three billion people live with less than two dollars a day; or that nearly a billion who entered the 21st century are unable to read a book or sign their names?

But what is poverty? Poverty has many aspects. It means to have no or not much money; it means not to have shelter; it means hunger; it means unemployment… Poverty is powerlessness. It particularly constitutes a threat in developing countries.

So what can we do? The United Nations Millennium Campaign to end poverty by 2015 has set its goal to end poverty in the next seven years. This means to end hunger, enable children to receive education, support gender equality, promote child and maternal health, combat HIV and similar diseases and promote environmental sustainability.

As the leading Information Technology (IT) corporation in the world, we at HP try to combat poverty with the help of our core competencies. i.e. by providing knowledge, skills and our technology.

According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, the average global unemployment rate of people aged 16-24 is 14%. It is significantly higher in regions such as North Africa (30%) and the Middle East (23%). Did you know that, even though unemployed or low income earners might have access to a computer, they do not know how to use it? This is also a form of poverty that we try to address, for example, through our flagship programme Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT).

I think that micro-enterprise development is one of the most effective ways of creating jobs and addressing poverty. With GET-IT, we foster business development by providing young people with IT skills so that they can enter business life more easily and even start their own business. GET-IT creates entrepreneurs and addresses problems of unemployment and low economic growth.

Let me share with you some encouraging success stories of GET-IT: In Russia, 51% of women participating in GET-IT trainings said that they have improved their social status through the programme. 11% of those have found a job. I was delighted when I heard about that.

We also work closely with local non-governmental organisations to set up GET-IT centres. NGO representatives are trained by our partner MEA-I so that they can then train young graduates. We know very well that both the education deficit and poverty rate in African countries are quite high and so we have also established a partnership with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) and plan to open more GET-IT training centres in African countries in the future.

Poverty constitutes a global issue which clearly cannot be healed by one player alone. Instead, it is up to everyone of us to consider what he or she can do to improve the situation and to act accordingly. I think that the theme of poverty is great as a Blog Action Day topic. We need to continuously raise awareness and show how small and big things can be achieved. I cannot wait to read some entries of other Blog Action Day participants.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

GET-IT – let’s walk the talk

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:27:00 GMT

I am at Brussels airport, flying home after our first annual GET-IT Conference, which was themed around “e-skills development for young entrepreneurs” and I am still very thrilled and excited about the 2 days we have spent together. The event took place at the Brussels HP office on September 18-19.

As you probably remember from my earlier blog entries, our Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT) is designed for under - or unemployed youth (aged 16-25) in underserved communities. We want to develop their IT and business skills so that they become more qualified for employment and better placed to create their own business.

We decided to hold a conference for our GET-IT network to bring them together from around Europe, Middle East and Africa, to foster knowledge exchange and best practise sharing amongst the group and discuss together how to grow GET-IT further in the most meaningful way.

Prior to the conference, we requested feedback from our network and results from our first year show that overall, our 70 GET-IT partners trained over 8300 young graduates and around 40% found a job after having attendend the courses. Wow, I can only say – great results, if you ask me!

During the conference we had a great mix of GET-IT centers, who have joined the network in 2007, when we launched our social flagship programme, but also centers that joined the network this year. In total GET-IT centers from more than 20 countries participated. We had young entrepreneurs, who attended the GET-IT training, who are the living example that the training works. They were able to launch successful businesses, created jobs for others and are even expanding their operations internationally now. Watch our newly launched GET-IT video, which is posted on our GET-IT website http://www.graduate-training-through-it.net/. Overall we had 41 partipants from 20 countries.

I also learned a lot in the workshop sessions, where we brainstormed about how to increase the impact of the training. This session was very benefical as we are always aiming at developing this programme further for the best local impact. But we also heard very intersting perspectives from the European Commission officials, who discuss the crucial role of e-skills and competences for Europe’s future as well as best practises from our highly valued partners of HP like JA-YE that discussed how the GET-IT curriculum helps advance their existing graduate programmes.

We heard from UNIDO, with whom we formed a partnership to strengthen the GET-IT programme in Africa, that some ICT students have not gotten the chance to be in front of a personal computer for 3 years! It is time to change that!

But clearly, one of the highlights was to hear from the GET-IT centers themselves, how they address entrepreneurship skill training. Great best practise sharing. And it is rewarding to see that GET-IT is so modular, that it adds value to the economic development in each country. We are currently running the programme in 25 countries with 70 partners.

The success of this conference supports us in our goal to increase the GET-IT network further. We want to establish 30 additional GET-IT centres and reach more than 500,000 students in total by 2010 through our GET IT centre network. I know it sounds like a high goal but only high goals enable you to stretch and go even further. I guess it is like chocolate: if you had one piece you want more and more.

To reach as many students as possible with GET-IT have been working on a web portal and presented the BETA version to the conference participants. The portal enables even those students who cannot access a GET-IT centre to still benefit from the programme through various features like the online game or video clips. I am particularly excited about this web portal because it allows us to reach more students in need for entrepreneurship skills. And I am proud to be part of this programme.

Conference participants welcomed the portal and showed tremendous interest in it. We will have a lot of partners testing it now and we hope to get valuable feedback to further advance the game. I must admit that I am a little bit jealous that such entertaining education tools have not existed when I was a graduate. It is amazing how much easier it seems to be for young people to pick up basic business and entrepreneurship principles through such tools.

And last but not least, I am particularly proud about our participants’and partners’ feedback that HP walks the talk with its strong social investment strategy and programmes.

Daniela Opp, Manager, Social Investments and Economic Development, HP EMEA

We need social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs

jeanne2007 — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:04:00 GMT

I have invited my colleague Ulrike Haug to share some thoughts around an interesting report she read on social intrapreneurship.

Regards,

Jeannette

We need social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs

I am sure all of you have already come across the term “social entrepreneur”. Social entrepreneurs address societal problems and aim at solving them through entrepreneurial business practices. But have you also heard about the “social intrapreneur”? I have to admit I only recently came across that expression in a report by SustainAbility . A social intrapreneur is an employee of a large corporation who uses entrepreneurial principles to address social and environmental challenges. She or he does so by delivering solutions or products that add both value to society as well as to the company’s bottom line.

Both concepts of social entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship really appeal to me. I’ve come across many inpiring examples of social entrepreneurship in the last few years and at HP we have various social investment programmes in place which aim at fostering social entrepreneurs. Just recently we have awarded the Austrian student company Infotainment with the HP Responsible Business Award as the student company integrated social aspects into their business model. The company developed tools to educate 8- to10-year-old students, their parents and teachers on environmental issues such as climate change. I guess you can call them already social entrepreneurs, even at their young age. Well done!

But we need both – social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs. While enabling societal change, social intrapreneurs are also significant for a company’s survival in an environment of rising expectations of the role of business in society. I am convinced that we will see social and environmental innovations play a bigger role for companies in the future and that those companies which foster their social intrapreneurs will be leaders in their industries.

I can think of some examples of social intrapreneurs at HP. For example, the team of HP employees from Hungary that developed a tool that allows customers to monitor and control parameters such as energy use, water consumption and sewage as well as air pollution at production sites or office buildings. The Hungarian team won our internal Sustainable Innovation Competition that we conducted with WWF.

I think it is crucial for us at HP to continue to foster our intrapreneurs and the innovations they bring to the company, and we are currently looking into ways of how we can further increase our support for them.

Have you come across social intrapreneurs in your organisations? I’d really like to hear from you. Just leave a comment.

Kind regards,

Ulrike Haug, CSR Communications

Global 2.0: network connections needed

jeanne2007 — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:09:00 GMT

I recently read an article by William J. Amelio, CEO of Lenovo who argues that the emerging economies’ ability to contribute ideas and knowledge to the global economy has meant that many more people have come out of poverty over the last 20 years than initially estimated by the World Bank.

He refers to “Global 2.0” as the driving force for the way out of poverty: We live in an interdependent network where innovative ideas are created in any corner. He is very right with what he says and I think we should make sure that the connectedness to emerging and developing countries gets stabilized.

HPs Social Investment Strategy focuses on the interconnectedness of different parts of the world with each other and in the next years, the networking aspect within our social investment programmes will be further strengthened. One big problem in African countries is for example that young graduates and scientists leave their home to follow a career in developed countries. To alleviate this “Brain Drain” we work together with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). With the help of grid computing technology we help scientists from select universities to connect with other scientists abroad and to get access to international research projects and resources.

Another example of global interconnectivity is our partnership with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization). We have agreed to open additional GET-IT training centres in African countries. GET-IT (Graduate Entrepreneurship training through IT) is another Social Investment Programme which aims at providing young unemployed graduates (age 16-25) with IT skills to enable them to set up their own business or to be better placed for work life. We provide IT equipment to non-governmental organisations (NGOs/NPOs) as well as professional guidance courses for their trainers so that they can offer interactive courses specifically designed to improve business IT skills of young unemployed school leavers and graduates. With UNIDO we have a strong partner at our side to spread GET-IT across the African continent where it can help to foster economic development and to especially enable emerging countries to build on their creative ideas and to be more successful in business. We are also planning to help the different GET-IT centers in mature and emerging markets become more closely linked to exchange best practices and learn from each other.

Global 2.0 is on its way!

Daniela Opp, Manager, Social Investments and Economic Development, HP Europe, the Middle East and Africa