In 2009, an enterprising student at Hult International Business School named Ahmad Ashkar had a compelling idea—crowd-sourcing brilliant solutions for how to change the world from college and university students around the world—and acted on it. He convinced Dr. Stephen Hodges, Hult’s president, to host an intercollegiate tournament to solve the global education crisis, in partnership with One Laptop per Child. He then invited teams in business schools to take up the challenge. The first annual Hult Prize (originally called the Hult Global Case Challenge) took place in the spring of 2010.
Building on the Hult Prize’s overwhelming success as a pilot program, it was permanently established as a not-for-profit organization, dedicated to launching a new wave of social entrepreneurs amongst the world's top business students. Ahmad Ashkar himself was named the organization’s first CEO. Hult International Business School provides invaluable office space and administrative support. Hult International Business School also hosts the annual regional final events at its six campuses worldwide. The USD 1 million prize is generously donated by self-made entrepreneur and Swedish billionaire, Bertil Hult, and his family.
Today, the Hult Prize has become a benchmark competition for social entrepreneurship. It’s is also the world’s most acclaimed business school event, crowd-sourcing the very best ideas to change the world from its brightest minds.
The Hult Prize Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to launching the world's next wave of social entrepreneurs. It encourages the world's brightest business minds to compete in teams to solve the planet's biggest challenges with innovative ideas for sustainable start-up enterprises. Annual Hult Prize winners can make their ideas reality with the help of USD1 million in seed funding.
Through its structured approach to defining the challenge and local, regional and global competition rounds, the Hult Prize actively seeks to create a new kind of social business. One that combines the forces for good and profit—what they call “NGO 2.0.” While many philanthropic and charitable organizations turn to non-governmental organizations as their primary resource for addressing some of the world’s most pressing social problems, current they often face funding gaps that derail them from their mission, inadvertently impacting millions of beneficiaries who count on their aid as a primary means of survival. The NGO of the future must be designed for sustainability as well as catalytic impact, ensuring that both social and financial returns are met. At the Hult Prize, they believe that the only way to achieve this is by introducing the "unusual suspect" - business students, to a whole new world, where they can have have impact and a career that is economically viable.
