WINNERS EADP SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAMME 2005

“You are the leaders of tomorrow: tell the leaders of today how you will search for information in your future business life and how you see the evolution of information technology”. This was the challenge the European Association of Directory and Database Publishers, EADP, headquartered in Brussels, had set students at European universities and business schools. In up to 5000 words, contestants had to imagine how they would search for, generate, retrieve and use vital business information when they are in the driver’s seat of corporations in perhaps a decade’s time - or even less, for the really high flyers.

 “The key word for future business life is not information but intelligence”, wrote Thierry Béranger, a 23 year old Frenchman studying at the HEC* in Paris, the winner of the first prize in the EADP competition, in a very intelligent essay which even dealt with future pricing patterns of information retrieval.

 The realization that finding the right information is more complicated than just “googling it” and that it may cost time, effort and money was at the centre of the essay of the winner of the second prize, Sonja Hierl, a Swiss-Danish student of the Fachhochschule Liechtenstein. She wrote, “use Google when it fits the purpose, don’t forget the search parameters and first of all, don’t treat search engines like finding engines.”

 The winner of the third prize, Polish student Mikolaj Kolacz, who studies at the Ecole de Management de Lyon, France, stressed the human element in future information gathering and suggested mining blogs, discussion forums and salesmen's reports. All entries, which came from 16 universities and business schools in 7 different countries, were judged by a panel of 12 judges from the directory publishing industry and academia, coming from 10 different countries.

 If the three winners of the competition, which carries prize money of Euros 6000, 3000 and 1500 for the first, second and third prize respectively, truly represent the next generation of business leaders, the future will be very international. All three are either studying or have worked abroad or come from mixed national backgrounds. They rubbed shoulders with over 220 of the present leaders of the directory and database publishing industry  - and perhaps future colleagues - from 35 countries around the world at EADP’s prestigious “European Conference on Managing Directories” at the Hilton Cavalieri in Rome, where on May 12th, EADP’s President presented the happy winners with their prizes.