CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : social investment

Case Study on Responsible Business Competition

ulrikehaug — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Allow me to draw your attention to our latest Case Study about the Responsible Business Competition, which we every year with Junior Achievement Young Enterprise Europe.

The latest addition to the competition is a new application on Facebook, the ‘Responsible Business Challenge’, which invites students up to the age of 25 to submit their ideas on what a responsible business could look like in the year 2020. You can vote for and comment on the ideas that have been submitted, even if you’re older than 25. Log on now and check out the application!

Ulrike Haug

Russian students win HP JA Global Business Challenge Award

jeanne2007 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:38:00 GMT

Wow! Nearly 1000 students participated in this year`s JA Global Business Challenge and eight teams made it to the final. In the end, the Russian Team Topol-M won the prestigious award, which included a cash prize of US $3,000. Second place was awarded to Team 4 Life from Kazakhstan and Team Kiki Phi from China came in third. Congratulations to all of you!

The HP Global Business Challenge is a business simulation game devised by Junior Achievement which has been supported by HP over the last years. It is a global competition, in which student teams from secondary schools and universities run virtual corporations. The challenge is based on an online programme, where the students have to make specific business decisions for their companies. The aim is that the students acquire business knowledge and skills and understand the real effect of the decisions that they make.

For more information about this year´s HP Global Business Challenge Award, please read this article or go to the HP Global Business Challenge information website.

Jeannette Weisschuh

Winners of 2009 Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award announced

ulrikehaug — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:41:00 GMT

You might have seen my earlier blog entries about our support for the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award and the video produced by WWF to support the award. Today, I am pleased to share with you the names of the winners of the essay competition!

First place went to Jonathan Alexander from the University of Bath, second was awarded to Luc Petit from Ashridge Business School and Srikanth Madani from the University of St. Gallen came third. They were awarded their prizes (EUR 7,000; EUR 5,000 and EUR 3,000 respectively plus career advice from Spencer Stuart) on Monday at the Swedish EU Presidency Conference called ‘Eco-efficient Economy – Towards Innovative and Sustainable Competitiveness’.

If you want to learn more about the winners and the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award, which was supported by HP, EABIS and WWF, you can listen to a podcast with Matthew Gitsham from Ashridge Business School and Jonathan and Srikanth or read our feature story.

If you’d like to read the 3,000 word essays by Jonathan, Luc and Srikanth, you can also download the Award Publication, which includes all the shortlisted essays.

Ulrike Haug

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.

Nigerian team selected as winners of HP Responsible Ideas Contest in Africa

ulrikehaug — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:41:00 GMT

You might remember previous blog entries about the 2009 Responsible Business Competition that we’re running with Junior Achievement (JA) Africa.

The latest milestone of this initiative is the selection of the winner of the African Responsible Ideas Contest, which took place in September. I’m pleased to tell you that the student team Black Diamond from Nigeria won first prize!

I was one of the panel of HP experts responsible for judging the finalists from the three participating countries (we’re running this contest as a pilot in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa this year) and it was a challenge to pick a winner out of all of the inspirational ideas that were submitted. On the panel, we had employees from the participating countries, from the HP CSR team and also two judges who had actually run student companies in the JA programme when they were still in school.

Black Diamond convinced the jury because they combined both social and environmental responsibility in their business idea. They had organised a rock concert in their home town of Lagos and used this event to raise awareness about HIV/Aids. They are also planning to use the proceeds of the event to implement a recycling scheme in their school and eventually their community.

I really enjoyed being on the panel of judges and working with JA in the three countries. It’s encouraging to see the various kinds of entrepreneurship education programmes that they offer to young people. If you know of any entrepreneurship initiatives for young people in Africa, please share them by posting a comment.

Ulrike Haug, CSR Stakeholder Programmes, HP EMEA

Innovation in Education Grant feature story: technology mobilises minds

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:26:00 GMT

Over the past month, we have worked on a feature story which gives a good overview of this year’s Innovation in Education Grant Initiative. This year 50 schools and universities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa received state-of-the-art HP technology and a cash grant to help them bring their projects to life. In addition, all grant winners were invited to attend the 2010 HP Innovations in Education Worldwide Summit.

All details can be found here.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, HP EMEA

Social Investment: What do we do?

Daniela.Opp — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:34:00 GMT

On this blog we always give you updates on our programme achievements. We decided to bring these updates together in a short article, to give you a great overview of our social investment approach and our main programmes. Click here to read the article.

I am looking forward to your comments to our Social Investment approach.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, EMEA

New podcast and case study: HP’s International Institute of Technology reaches out

jeanne2007 — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:08:00 GMT

Since the launch of our International Institute of Technology (HP IIT) programme in Russia at the beginning of 2008, the programme has really taken off and is now expanding into other European countries. The IIT programme aims to support IT skills training in In Russia, 17 universities have been equipped with IT hardware, which has enabled them to offer 22 education courses and eight laboratory workshops. But we’re not stopping at Russia.

HP IIT is spreading its wings and is now also available in other European countries such as Bulgaria, Poland and the Ukraine. We recently published a case study about the Institute and talked to Igor Belousov, HP IIT manager and head of HP’s Open Innovations Office in Russia in a podcast about the success of HP IIT. You can read the case study here and listen to the podcast here.

HP IIT is a great way to teach students relevant IT-related business skills such as IT management and printing technology. It’s encouraging to hear the first results and feedback from participants. As an example, a member of the Russian Academy of Science has said that our IIT programme, with all its training facilities, is vital for some Russian industries. I will keep you posted on future evolvements of our programme.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

New Global Citizenship Video

ulrikehaug — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:22:00 GMT

We have just released an updated version of our ‘Global Citizenship in EMEA’ video and I would like to invite you to watch it and leave your comments.

In the video, HP managers in charge of environmental responsibility, social investment, supply chain responsibility and privacy describe what HP does in their area of global citizenship.

Let me know what you think and if you know of any CSR videos by other companies that you find worth watching.

Ulrike Haug, CSR Stakeholder Programmes, HP EMEA

UNESCO´s multi-cultural happening on higher education

jeanne2007 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:03:00 GMT

This week in Paris UNESCO held one of their biggest conferences on higher education, gathering more than 1,200 thought leaders from around the globe.

The World Conference of Higher Education, or WCHE for short, has been pretty impressive in many ways. Ministers of Education and their delegations as well as academics from universities with multiple different cultural backgrounds discussed how to tackle the biggest challenges of teaching and learning in a more and more global world, taking into account the social, economic and environmental changes.

I remember one of the opening sessions on The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research, where official representatives from China, India, Columbia, Senegal, Egypt and Romania addressed the issues of higher education from their respective backgrounds. Wow, what a variety of insights and experiences we were able to gather in this one session! We clearly realised that globalisation is one of the main drivers changing higher education and, to stay relevant and competitive in a global and rapidly changing marketplace, requires continuous education and training.

Most traditional universities are not designed for these new requirements yet. Information technology plays an increasingly important role in helping universities deal with the pace of change, to offer distance learning opportunities, to help them benefit from social media and cloud computing wherever, however and whenever online curricula and learning services are required.

In one of the keynote presentations, Michael Mendenhall, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer from HP, made it pretty clear that IT is significantly changing the education equation: "The last time we saw such a radical change was when monks writing with quills in monasteries were supplanted by Guttenberg´s printing press".

There are many IT projects out there already that address the new requirements in higher education. For example, in collaboration with UNESCO, HP is working on a project to set up the first e-infrastructure in Africa and the Arab region that will support universities running innovative education projects in their home countries and connecting them with experts from around the world with the help of grid and cloud computing technologies. For more information read our case study.

The UNESCO conference has clearly helped to raise issues, highlight best practices and stimulate expert debate to find solutions for the challenges of the future . I will be excited to see the results and agreed next steps resulting from the conference that will be summarised in a communiqué and published within the next couple of weeks. Let’s stay tuned!

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

Lithuanian Student Company wins HP Responsible Business Award – my weekend in Rotterdam

Daniela.Opp — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:52:00 GMT

For the fourth consecutive year, we awarded the ‘HP Responsible Business Award’ to a student company in Europe last weekend. This year’s winner is the Lithuanian student team Greblys Company, which won the award for their environmental education offering. Congratulations to the team of five secondary school students!

The HP Responsible Business Award is given to the student company who has proved to be the best at integrating strong financial performance, social responsibility, environmental excellence and innovation into their business plan and operations. The award is part of the HP Responsible Business Competition, an extension of the existing JA-YE Annual Company Programme which gives secondary school students the opportunity to prepare for working life through the experience of running their own company.

My colleagues and I spent this past weekend in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where we formed a special jury to interview this year’s 32 student companies that participated in the JA-YE Annual Company of the Year Competition. These companies are already winners in their own right, because the European Finals of the Company of the Year Programme only invite the national finalists. This year, it was especially difficult for our jury to judge the 32 companies as the majority of them fulfilled the criteria for our award, these being:

Social responsibility: meeting the wider concerns of stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, customers and local communities.
Environmental excellence: preventing pollution, optimising resource efficiency and developing products with minimal environmental impact. Note: This is not just about producing a ‘green’ product. It’s also about how the environmental impact is reduced in operations and during the product lifecycle (from design to manufacturing and end-of-life/recycling).
Innovation and Strong financial performance

So, at the end,it was a tough call and after two days of evaluating company reports, interviews, stage presentations and visiting stands at the fair, the Lithuanian students convinced us of their comprehensive approach that incorporated both social and environmental responsibility.

The team created a book and three computer games which are designed to help young children learn the basic principles of recycling in an easy and enjoyable way. Their products are unique to the Lithuanian market as environmental education through books and online games is unheard of. Greblys also sold the books to the main recycling companies, which then sold or donated them to customers and schools. Make sure you check out their website www.eko.mokinukai.lt. As you can imagine, the team was over the moon, as no Lithuanian team had won a European student company competition before. The team will be rewarded with HP technology.

The HP Responsible Business Competition not only includes this award but it also has an online ideas competition. You may have read the blog from my colleague Ulrike Haug. This year, record-beating results were reached with over 300 students submitting their ideas.

Other elements of the competition include an online certification via the Responsible Business Website and school visits by HP employees. Overall, more than 100,000 students have benefited from the HP Responsible Business Competition since its inception in 2006. This year many HP employees volunteered their time to work with these students and to be present at their schools. This is a great motivational activity that we, as the CSR team, can offer to our em ployees. So really, this is a win-win situation for both HP employees, the students and their teachers.

And just one further point,, I’d like to let you know that our colleagues in North and South America have seen the benefit of this kind of entrepreneurship skills education initiative and they have been deploying this programme in the Americas this year as well.

Daniela Opp, Manager Social Investments, EMEA

New Podcast: Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic from UNESCO talks about partnership on ‘brain drain’

ulrikehaug — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:24:00 GMT

I’d like to invite you to listen to our latest CSR podcast with Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic from UNESCO. Stamenka works in UNESCO’s Division of Higher Education where she is Chief of the Section for Reform, Innovation and Quality Assurance. She has been involved in the UNESCO/HP private public partnership since 2003, when we launched a pilot programme that focuses on alleviating ‘brain drain’ in South East Europe.

Through this initiative, HP and UNESCO have helped universities in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia to connect to international research networks with the help of grid-technology. This has allowed the students and faculty to participate in world-class research without having to leave their countries.

I recently met Stamenka at a project meeting where we discussed the extension of our African pilot initiative (which followed the South East Europe project in 2006) to more universities in Africa and the Arab States this year. Not having been with HP during the time of the South East Europe project, I enjoyed learning from Stamenka what worked in this initial project and what didn’t.

Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think about our initiative to connect universities with the help of grid and cloud computing technologies.

Ulrike Haug CSR Stakeholder Programmes

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

HP Employee Jury Selects German Student Company as Winner of HP/JA-YE Responsible Ideas Contest

ulrikehaug — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:23:00 GMT

Together with Junior Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe we’ve just announced the winner of the HP Responsible Business Ideas Contest: The German student company ‘solAround’.

The secondary school students from Peine were selected for their initiatives to promote the use of solar power in their community. Among other things, the team designed a portal to introduce investors to people interested in renting out their roofs. They also organised a solar fair, produced a magazine and designed a game. You can read more about the students and the ideas contest in JA-YE’s announcement.

I’ve been reviewing the submissions made for the HP Responsible Business Ideas Contest for the last three years and I have to say I was extremely impressed with the quality of work this year. It was quite difficult to select a winner given the wealth of ideas and business concepts that incorporated social and environmental criteria.

We had more than 300 student companies and individuals participate in the award which has been running for three years in Europe. JA-YE formed a jury to preselect the best entries for each of the 10 participating countries - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia and Slovakia. I was part of the HP Employee Jury that selected the Top 10 entries shown below:

solAround Germany
Peace Tree Israel
Watt Portugal
Better Windows Russia
Petra Systems Poland
Equalite Slovakia
Navem Romania
Ekoefekt Poland
AquaBiz Russia
Kaseton Poland

Ulrike Haug, CSR Stakeholder Programmes

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