Students from ‘Team Hattrick’ in Lithuania were announced winners of HP’s 2008 Global Business Challenge in August, and were given a cash prize of $3,000. The challenge, now in its 13th year, is designed to increase business knowledge and skills of students from all over the world and is presented in conjunction with Junior Achievement Worldwide (JA).
The competition began in February this year, with 238 university and high school teams from around the world taking part. Two elimination rounds took place over the course of the year until the final eight teams were invited to HP’s offices in Colorado Springs, USA to participate in the final face-to-face rounds of the competition.
The other finalists on the competition included university students from Argentina and Azerbaijan and high school students from Canada, Estonia and Hong Kong.
Simulated global marketplace
The students’ challenge is based on JA Titan™, an online programme that allows teams of students to act as CEOs of virtual manufacturing companies and compete against each other to earn the highest performance index.
The teams were asked to make decisions that affect the profitability and sustainability of their virtual company. Their challenge was to outperform their competitors not just in terms of profit, but also in sales and market share. In doing so, they were required to invest in capital, plan research, marketing and development budgets, determine production levels and set prices.
Supporting tomorrow’s entrepreneurs
Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA, said: “JA is one of world’s largest organisations dedicated to inspiring and preparing young people to succeed in a global economy through in-school and after-school enterprise education programmes. Our partnership with them has always supported our goal of encouraging innovation, diversity and global collaboration among the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
HP also announced a grant commitment to JA Worldwide for 2009 which will total $1 million.
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