Jaded office workers tend to regard summer interns as a seasonal scourge as irritating as wasps at picnics. But Iain Whiteside, 21, has proved the detractors wrong by completing a project expected to generate revenues of £4.3m a year for his employer, Martin Energy, and its customer Tesco.

While many work experience recruits are fobbed off with filing jobs by older colleagues desperate to get on with some real work, Mr Whiteside was charged with finding solutions to some thorny problems that Martin Energy was having with a green energy project for the supermarket chain.