Our world faces many serious global challenges. From climate crisis, to affordable food, to poverty, to human rights for everyone. The list is daunting in both length and scale. With so many challenges before us two questions are key: what can be done about them, and who can realistically begin to tackle them now and into the future?
Common sense would suggest that we need to be armed with the requisite skills to assess each challenge and find the best solutions for each one. Just as importantly, if not more so, we need the will and passion to make changes and see them through.
For many, the obvious way to approach the global problems that surround us is to see them as technical in nature and to believe that merely increasing decision making efficiency will solve them all. Whilst increased efficiency is likely to be part of any successful plan the whole solution will usually be more nuanced and require a more sophisticated level of understanding.
For example, before beginning to scrutinise and tackle each challenge it would be helpful to have an understanding about how to influence people's decision making, how to encourage people into different behaviours and how to provide inspiring solutions. Fortunately, there are several potentially useful fields that help leaders understand human behaviour, influences and decision making - such as economics, game theory and geopolitics. Ultimately, any workable solution is likely therefore to require an understanding of the market mechanism - how people make decisions about things, how to make things happen, and what makes markets work. In short, the kind of skills we see being used in business every day and the type of entrepreneurial thinking we apply in today’s fast-moving commercial world.
As well as possessing the skills to tackle global challenges, it’s just as important to have the passion to make changes in the world in the first place. Fortunately, the up-and-coming generations are aware of, and are enthused, to tackle global issues like never before.
The Engineers in Business Fellowship (EIBF) is a charity that has awarded over £11 million of Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) scholarships to young working engineers to study for an MBA. As president of the charity, I am a firm believer in injecting the creativity and excitement of commercial education into undergraduate and graduate education. This, in turn, will give engineers additional skills that will help enable them to alleviate challenging problems.
EIBF promotes the importance and value of business education for engineers to help improve people’s lives and the performance of the UK and global economies. We whole-heartedly support entrepreneurial thinking as a key driver to help address many of our global challenges. Through our Sainsbury Management Fellows MBA scholarship scheme, we have shown that equipping young engineers with business education has a substantial and disproportionately highly positive impact on the economy and society.
While engineering skills are vital in any society, it is hugely advantageous to also understand business. The career developments and achievements of our Sainsbury Management Fellows Alumni demonstrate that business and engineering skills are symbiotic.
The Global Innovation Index highlights the importance of innovation. The Index gives an innovation score to each country, highlighting how good a country is at innovation based on a range of innovation inputs and outputs, and charts this against economic wealth. This index highlights the positive relationship between innovation and economic development: The more innovative the country is, the wealthier it is, and the better the quality of life its citizens enjoy.
Great Britain sits close to the top of the chart because it has a high GDP per capita on a purchasing power parities basis (the broadly accepted comparative measure of wealth in a country) and we enjoy high quality of life, as wells as excellent education, healthcare, and lifespan.
It's not a coincidence that we also rank highly for innovation. One reason to equip engineers with business skills is to maintain, or improve, Britain’s position on the Innovation Index. We can also do our part, along with other countries, to help other nations become wealthier, healthier, improve living standards, and help them to be even more innovative. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
EIBF’s Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) MBA scholarship scheme enables us to play our part in the innovation cycle. We have helped 375 engineers to acquire key business skills that have enabled them to go on to establish and sustain over 300 innovative new businesses, valued at £4.8 billion, that have created more than 20,000 jobs. In addition, the SMF Alumni play a vital role in mentoring future engineers and nearly all are involved in charitable ventures.
Each year, Engineers in Business Fellowship awards £500,000 worth of Sainsbury Management Fellows scholarships to ten young engineers, which it does in conjunction with the Royal Academy of Engineering. If you are a young engineer who wishes to acquire business education that will help you be part of the innovation cycle and solve global problems, you can apply for a scholarship.
As well as funding MBA scholarships for working engineers, EIBF also supports business education for undergraduate engineers. It does this by providing cash prizes at business competitions at 40 universities in the UK, and offering mentoring to the prize winners. EIBF also runs its own national business ideas competition for universities. The EIBF Champion of Champions Competition has become a microcosm of mixing business skills with engineering and highlights our entrepreneurial potential. The skills learned through all of these competitions also produces more rounded engineers, who have the combination of technical skills, commercial acumen, and soft skills - such as teamwork and communication skills - which are highly valued in the workplace.