Russian Team Fishka Wins HP’s Responsible Business Ideas Contest
Brussels - July 17, 2008 – Junior Achievement-Young Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe and HP Europe, the Middle East & Africa (EMEA) today announced the winners of the HP Responsible Business Ideas Contest. This contest awards students across Europe for business ideas that best combine business practice with social and environmental responsibility.
The Russian team “Fishka” took the top place with their zero-waste business model designed to preserve the traditional decorative wood art “Tulskaya vsechka”. The student company reduces the environmental impact throughout the production process of this wood art by using off cuts, recycling leftovers and turning waste like sawdust into fertilizer for plants. In addition, Fishka gives back to their local community by providing training in wood craft techniques for disabled children. This raises awareness for the art heritage of their region and locally promotes resource saving technologies and tools.
“This programme showed us that social responsibility and business are not contradictory, but can indeed mutually support each other,” said Aleksandra Savogina a member of the Russian team. “We learned a lot through this project about how companies should operate in today’s society and appreciated the expertise that HP and JA-YE shared.”
“Learning to be entrepreneurs of the future should go hand in hand with a growing awareness of corporate responsibility,” said Gabi Zedlmayer, vice president of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA. “There should be no trade-off between achieving business performance and meeting environmental and social goals. The student ideas put forward in this online contest showed not only a great business sense, but also a desire to achieve something tangible for the community – save energy, conserve resources and gain efficiencies.”
“Teaching young people how business works in a responsible way and how rewarding entrepreneurship can be is an essential part of our objective. We need to do more to assure that young people have the proper training and education,” said Caroline Jenner, CEO of JA-YE Europe.
There were 200 student company teams from 14 European countries that participated in the HP Responsible Business Idea contest this academic year. The contest is part of the yearly HP Responsible Business competition, where, over the past year, 121 HP employees have volunteered their time to offer JA-YE student companies advice on how to run a responsible business. The highlight of the competition, the HP Responsible Business Award, will be presented in Stockholm on 26 July to the JA-YE student company with the most comprehensive approach to social and environmental responsibility.
Editorial notes
JA-YE Europe (www.ja-ye.org) is Europe’s largest provider of enterprise education programmes, reaching 2,6 million students in 40 countries in 2007. Funded by businesses, institutions, foundations and individuals, JA-YE brings the public and private sectors together to provide young people in primary and secondary schools and early university with high-quality education programmes to teach them about enterprise, entrepreneurship, business and economics in a practical way. The JA-YE Company Programme is recognised by the European Commission Enterprise Directorate General as a ‘Best Practice in Entrepreneurship Education’. JA-YE Europe is the European headquarters for JA Worldwide.
HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $110.4 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2008. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.
Editorial contacts:
Sarah McIntyre
Hewlett-Packard Company
Tel: +44 774 745 5536
Sarah.mcintyre@hp.com
Diana Filip
JA-YE
Tel: +32 2 626 6174
Mobile: +32 485 125 969
diana@ja-ye.org