Week 1: Kicking Off and Digging In


I know I’m behind on my blogging, and this is the start of my effort to catch up! Week 1 was relatively insane, busy, exciting, difficult, and challenging. The biggest question in my mind is always “how can we provide the maximum amount of value to our client, and the startup ecosystem, in Budapest?” There are so many opportunities… how do we identify the ones that our client in uniquely suited to successfully tackle?

Some background: BEA, our client, is a government (city) agency that focuses on supporting startups with 1) relevant programming, 2) connections, and 3) small loans, e.g. micro finance. On #3, we know that this is important but likely not going to solve many of the “big problems” because the scale of these loans is relatively limited (I will spare you the statistical explanation).

#s 1 and 2 are where the real opportunity lies.

During our first week we had many meetings with our client and conducted eight individual client team member interviews. From these interviews we gained insight into internal operations and increased our understanding of their perceptions of the marketplace. We saw some themes emerging, and we also saw a breadth of viewpoints that didn’t necessarily align. This, of course, would be expected at any company… but does present challenges as we try to determine what opinions to weigh more heavily into our recommendations and which to view as “outlier” POVs that require further exploration. 
Sometimes an outlier POV is just what you need to unlock a new, exciting line of thinking… but it takes more time to get there!

We also prepped for a Design Thinking Workshop which we held on Monday of Week Two (more to come on this in the next blog post).

As Week One came to a close we knew we needed to talk to more entrepreneurs and small and medium size business (SMEs) co-founders, which we determined was our primary mission in Week Two.

Week one also had a bit of fun built in!

Friday evening, before even our first day of client work began, I met up with Dr. Bill Hunter, a mentor of mine at Lehigh, and his wife, Christi, who were COINCIDENTALLY in Budapest to speak at a conference. It was a lovely dinner and evening.



Saturday we kicked off our official deployment with a Hungarian cultural and economic orientation from IBM Hungary execs, as well as a brief city tour to get the lay of the land. 

Tuesday we had our official kickoff ceremony, which media attended and I did not say anything controversial. https://bbj.hu/business/ibm-brings-corporate-service-corps-mission-to-hungary_155819?fbclid=IwAR0YStIM7rVuvdKmIKUZInVxbR6Oa85JrMPR7uS0_bpQoAhpSmNs_GzwjOA

Wed-Friday filled with client work.

Saturday a trip to Szentendre, a town an hour north of Budapest. It was lovely to escape the chaos and exhaust fumes of the city. HIGHLY recommend this side trip if you are in Budapest for more than a few days.

And, to close out the week, on Saturday evening a Hungarian wine tasting at Tasting Table (https://tastehungary.com/tasting-table-budapest/). Excellent!

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