Today, HP announced the global winners of the HP/Junior Achievement Social Innovation Relay (SIR), a global competition that challenges high school students around the world to develop projects and business ideas that could result in significant positive social impacts for their communities. Coached by HP mentors along the way, the students learned to think like innovators and developed skills to become future entrepreneurs.
After two rounds of competition, with students from 11 countries, a team of students from Nzhnekamsk, Russia, won the global title.
The team developed a sustainable business concept, called Fortuna. The initiative is designed to encourage citizens to manufacture and sell products created from recyclable waste materials, potentially driving profit while reducing waste.
While leading a team of students to a country-level victory in the U.S., student Deepti Bansal from Carlmont High School in Belmont, California also gained valuable skills from her participation in SIR.
Deepti’s team developed the concept for FindTime.org, a website that would help people identify the areas they’d like to volunteer in and match these potential volunteers with applicable organizations that need their help. Passionate about volunteering themselves, the team believed this venture could help the world socially, economically and environmentally.
“We knew that non-profits and charities always need additional hands but often don’t have adequate resources to reach volunteers,” she said. “We also learned that 63.8 million people worldwide volunteered between 2009 and 2010, so by making the right connections with our website, we could enable a massive amount of people to help out where they want, when they want.”
The team also benefited from collaborating with their mentor, Ganesh Sharma Tyagali, a software architect at HP.
“We would give him ideas and then he would respond with questions that got us thinking about potential problems with our idea,” Deepti said. “This made us think more analytically and ended up strengthening the project. He didn’t just give us the answers; he made us think for ourselves.”
Ganesh noticed an improvement in the team’s thought-process throughout the competition.
“I tried to get the team to think about what they wanted to do, to develop their own ideas that would address social issues,” Ganesh said. “The goal was not to be technically exact. Rather, we wanted them to understand what was unique about the product they were conceiving and the structured processes required to bring it to fruition.”
“Although some of the kids started off skeptical, I could actually see them becoming more socially conscious as the project progressed,” he said.
While the competition focused on inventing solutions, Deepti is confident that the team could implement their concept as well.
“There is always a way to solve a problem, you just need to come up with an innovative solution,” she said. “No matter what you do, if you work hard you can change the world.”
