Social Impact Business of the Year 2013

Founder: Eben Upton, Jack Lang, Pete Lomas
Year Started:  2011
Website: www.raspberrypi.org

With its primary goal to “put the fun back into computing”, The Raspberry Pi Foundation designs and licenses small-board educational microcomputers (Raspberry Pis) for education. A socially-minded business, the Foundation has recently been working with OCR to improve the computing curriculum in schools and to help to improve the technical abilities of candidates looking to study computing as they progress into higher education.

Its focus is not just concentrated on the UK though with its wider goal to impact upon computing globally. It has been working with educators in several other countries and has already begun organising the provision of hardware packages to every public school in the Middle East, an impressive feat by any standards.

Judges comments:

It’s highly unlikely you don’t know The Raspberry Pi Foundation. Judges were so enthusiastic about everything co-founder Eben Upton has achieved in such a short time and how they broke the rules. The product, which gained a $1m grant from Google to put the computers into the hands of children in the UK, looks set to have an enormous global impact on computing, business, and most importantly for this award, society.