Slovakian Student Company wins HP Responsible Business Award 2007

HP Europe, the Middle East & Africa (EMEA) presented the 2007 HP Responsible Business Award to the Slovakian student team DIFFID (www.diffid.gta.sk ), which designed a greenhouse made from recycled plastic during the Junior Achievement Young Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe Company of the Year Competition.

“The Plastic Greenhouse, or PG House, offers an affordable and sustainable alternative to regular glass greenhouses for farmers. We decided to develop the product after recycling more than three thousand plastic bottles at our school cafeteria in less than two months,” said Erik Krusc, president of DIFFID. The Plastic Greenhouse is part of a comprehensive social and environmental business strategy developed by the Slovakian student team at their school.

Student companies from 30 European countries competed for the Award, which aims to encourage potential entrepreneurs to come up with a comprehensive approach to social and environmental responsibility. During the competition, 52 HP employees volunteered their time to offer students advice on integrating CSR into their businesses.

“Today successful companies are measured not just against their financial results and innovative business ideas, but also against their ability to balance the economical, social and environmental aspects of running a business. We want to help entrepreneurs and start-up companies find new ways to achieve this,” said Gabi Zedlmayer, vice president of Corporate Marketing and Global Citizenship, HP EMEA.

The annual HP Responsible Business Award (www.responsible-business.org ) is given to the JA-YE student company whose business plan best combines financial performance, innovation, and social and environmental responsibility. The first HP Responsible Business Award was won in 2006 by an Estonian student company that created wallets from used juice-cartons. The Award is part of the HP Responsible Business Competition, an extension of the existing JA-YE Annual Company of the Year Competition (www.juniorprojekt2007.de ) which gives students aged 16-18 across Europe the opportunity to prepare for working life through the experience of running their own company.

“We believe that businesses like HP have something tremendously valuable to offer when it comes to business education. They add a current, real-life aspect to business education, which full-time teachers just can’t offer. They also have cross-border initiatives and reporting lines that really help us deliver our programmes on a much larger scale,” said Caroline Jenner, CEO of JA-YE Europe.

The HP Responsible Business Award is a result of the ongoing cooperation between JA-YE and HP. For over a decade, HP and JA-YE joint activities have included support for enterprise education programmes and special events through cash and equipment donations, as well as the participation of HP employees as volunteers in local JA-YE programmes.

JA-YE Europe (www.ja-ye.org ) is Europe’s largest provider of enterprise education programmes, reaching 2.2 million students in 40 countries in 2006. 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’.