Protected: Hussein, Enterprise Challenge

Drawing on the skills from our Enterprise Challenge programme, Hussein has come up with an award-winning business idea to produce electricity out of thin air.

Hussein is just sixteen years old, but he has big plans for his future. With impressive digital and engineering skills, he is keen to develop hi-tech solutions to everyday problems – such as high energy prices – and he is full of ideas.

When Hussein joined our Enterprise Challenge programme, delivered in Jordan through our partner INJAZ, the programme gave him the chance to build his skills and flex his creativity.

‘When Injaz came to my school, I built a team with my friends. We brainstormed an idea for a project we wanted to do, about how to produce electricity from the air. We considered different options and then we voted for the best idea,’ Hussein explains.

Enterprise Challenge gives school students the chance to develop entrepreneurship skills through coaching, mentoring and an online simulation game. As part of the programme, teams of teenagers then develop and pitch their own business ideas in a national competition, focusing on initiatives with a positive environmental or social impact.

Generating ideas and energy

Hussein was his team’s leader, responsible for allocating roles to his five teammates. He found the creative process particularly inspiring. ‘The parts of the programme I most enjoyed were our discussions about ideas,’ he remembers. ‘Entrepreneurs have to generate ideas and constantly improve those ideas.’

The business concept which the team eventually settled on involves a small turbine device, attached to vehicles, which transforms airflow into energy as the vehicles move. Hussein explains that the idea behind the project was to harness a clean, renewable energy source which does not contribute to climate change. As well as reducing cars’ carbon footprint, Hussein’s idea also aims to improve air quality and so reduce the incidence of pollution-related respiratory diseases.

‘Using wind energy doesn’t produce harmful emissions like fossil fuels, which contribute to air pollution and climate change,’ he explains. ‘Using wind turbines reduces the carbon footprint and helps combat global warming.’

Building skills and belief

Hussein outlines how the programme helped to build up his business and financial knowledge, identifying the virtual simulation game as a particular learning highlight. The game gave his team the chance to launch and manage a simulated business over an eight-week period, a task which gave them extensive practice in entrepreneurial problem solving.  ‘The simulation game taught me how to succeed in business,’ he explains, simply.

Hussein also valued the ongoing coaching input that supported his team as they developed their business concept.

‘The opportunity to work in a team with a coach from Injaz that helped and guided us made things seem possible and kept us believing that we could do it,’ he recalls. 

That belief was justified. The team’s business concept saw them win second prize in Jordan’s national Enterprise Challenge final, and Hussein has since been named the joint regional winner of the Prince’s Trust Global Sustainability Award.