Not all MBA graduates are destined for an executive position in a global bank. One such person is Harry Clarke, most known for his creation of RingGo, a product that allows drivers to pay for their parking through mobile phone and once famously criticized by Jeremy Clarkson’s BBC Top Gear show.

Despite Clarkson’s reservations, RingGo has taken off, with mobile parking transactions now taking place all over the UK. Clarke’s business has been so successful that he now plans to take it further afield, notably to the United States.

I had the pleasure of meeting Clarke at the 2011 Cranfield School of Management Awards Evening in London last week. Clarke was there to receive the Entrepreneur Alumnus of the Year award as founder of Cobalt Telephone Technologies.

After graduating with an MBA from Cranfield in 1992, “With grades ranked in the lower quartiles”, he joined Mercury Telecommunications.

“I was in one of those roles where I came up with good ideas for the board,” he says. “And one day I came up with this truly brilliant idea which had a payback of three weeks, and I took it to the board which I met every month and presented it [to] the best of my ability.”

His idea was a simple telephone switching system. When the firm’s call centre became inundated with customer calls, the system would redirect calls to a network of the firm’s retail stores as to reduce waiting time for customers. The investment would have cost only £30,000 as it would have used mostly existing infrastructure.

“It was rejected at the first hearing. I came back four weeks later … and they said again, no we don’t want to go with this.”

It was at this point that he became frustrated with the corporate world and decided to throw in the towel. “The confidence that you get from a business school – a good business school - was such that… I felt… I am right here, you are wrong. I am going to leave and start my own company which uses the exact same technology which I have researched and if you are not bright enough to listen to it, then I will bloody well go and do it myself.”

Reassured by his qualifications, he began to build his new company with his £20,000 redundancy money and a salvaged portakabin. “If it all went wrong, I could pick myself up and do it all over again”, he commented confidently. “Because I knew that with a Cranfield MBA, I could always get a job and always make sufficient money to put a roof over the head of my family… and with that certainty banked away… it does give you vast amounts of freedom.”

What made the Cranfield experience so important on his entrepreneurial journey? “A lecturer who had started his own company… He bought tins of Hungarian jam, which was very cheap, and put it in posh pots and sold it, which wasn’t done at that time,” he recalls.

“His stories of how much fun it was to run a business by the skin of his teeth, how he almost went bankrupt but saved the day through hard work. It was so inspirational that it has stuck with me until today – the sheer fun of running a business.”

It was also at Cranfield nearly two decades ago when he recognized the potential within the telecommunications market. “Very simply – somebody once said to me, you will make more money with things that go bleep than those that go clunk,” he says.

“I remember one strategy teacher saying that there had been three waves – the wave of industrialization, the wave of transportation and then the new wave in communications.”

As for the value of his MBA education, it has been “absolutely crucial to my life’s ambition,” he says passionately. “I think I have pretty much achieved it, which is to own a company of which I am immensely proud of, without having compromised my integrity.”

“It’s not at the scale of taking over the world or something… the lovely thing is, I have seen individuals in the company join, buy into it, and grow personally from it.”