Tag: Hungary

Guest blogger: Sabrina Alexandre, Glazer Global Learning Scholarship Recipient, visited Hungary in May as a member of the Venture Advising Consulting Course. She will also be studying abroad next Spring in Scotland.

A Visit to the House of Terror
“Americans are united by a shared image of the future, but Hungarians are united by a shared image of the past.”

We were all sitting around the conference room table for our first day at the firm in Budapest when our professor stated those words. He was close to wrapping up a PowerPoint on Hungarian history when he started to share his past experiences living in the US. He shared a long list of differences between the two countries but he wanted us to understand how powerful a nation’s shared vision can be. For Hungarians, the past was something too fresh in their collective memory for them to escape.

One place we visited brought that vision of the past to life: the House of Terror. Something with the name “House of Terror” almost seemed villainesque, like the lair of the evil doer from your favorite cartoon as a kid. Everything about the outside felt grand and dramatic and it built up a lot anticipation. You could spot the building from blocks away in all directions. It was this tall gray fixture at the end of street. The neutral color did nothing to camouflage the building among its neighbors because one look above and you can see giant steel plates plunging out of the building with the letters RORRET meticulously carved into them. When the light shines through the letters, the word gets flipped and along the side of the building in big, bold and glowing letters to spell out TERROR.

The House of Terror is the museum that holds the shared Hungarian vision. Inside that building is the story of the country under both Nazi and Soviet occupation. Until recently, the people of Hungary were under the strict control of the Soviet Union and before that, they were occupied by the Nazis during World War II. Generations of Hungarians were held captive in their own homes.

The House of Terror was split down the middle. Half of the museum was dedicated to the atrocities of World War II and the other half showcased the terrors of being under Russian rule. Imagine one room, but one side there’s a Nazi Uniform and videos from World War II and on the other side there were Soviet uniforms and videos from their occupation. The displays blended the two eras to form this continuous memory of oppression.

Some rooms had pictures and videos, some showcased testimonials from survivors like any other museum, but others displayed the original cars of the eras. We even toured the secret jail cells in the basement.

As you’re walking through the galleries you are reminded of the many Hungarians, like our professor, who still have first hand accounts of these events because they are so recent. I couldn’t handle being in that building for more than an hour, but so many Hungarian citizens live with those memories everyday. You can see the city healing, but the scars are only now starting to fade away.

The tour of the House of Terror had left me completely drained. The building was designed to present visitors with a nonstop feeling of dread, and I felt it. After being inside for an hour, I wanted to escape. As I watched old men on the screen recollect their lives under Nazi and Russian rule, it dawned on me that they had to survive both eras of oppression. The fact that this could happen, but remain relatively untold by our history books, is depressing. I had to travel halfway around the world to understand the fate that the people in Eastern Europe were dealt.

To be honest, I could have been presented with a documentary from the comfort of my home and it would not have had the lasting impact that each exhibit had. It’s one thing to read it or even watch it on television but it’s another to stand inside the actual prison cells and think, how can anyone ever do this to another human being? Physically being in that space was too much to process in the moment. It was eye opening.

The people I met in Budapest were so happy and inviting and I find myself appreciating their hospitality even more after my trip to the museum. I can’t imagine living with those memories of oppression, but choosing to rise above them and still be so warm and welcoming to strangers.

Top Photo by Sam Whitfield  and Creative Commons License

Other photos provided by guest blogger

Student teams in the Venture Advising Consulting Course taught by Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, spend 10 days in Budapest, Hungary immersed in the startup community and working on specific projects with founders. They also learn about Eastern European history and culture. Each team in this year’s course will submit a blog post about their experience and consulting project.

We are fortunate to have been selected to work on a consulting project in Budapest, Hungary for a company that creates software and apps for e-bike navigation: GPS Tuner, a leader in the field of software development for GPS navigation. GPS Tuner currently works with original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) to build GPS navigation devices for e-bikes. They aim to transition into launching their own application for the end consumer.

Our project is to identify a strategy to differentiate GPS Tuner’s e-bicycle navigation app by conducting a competitive analysis, crafting a clear value proposition for the app, and developing a strategy that will solidify the company’s strategic position going forward.

Throughout our week in Budapest, we’ve focused on developing a hypothesis tree to clearly define and tackle our project. This problem-solving strategy is focused on finding one core business issue and then delving deeper into mutually exclusive, but collectively exhaustive sub-issues, which might be causing the business problem.

Our work with the client, GPS Tuner, introduced us to the struggles of a fragmented market and how a setup like this can lead to beneficial results for an incumbent market leader. From an academic standpoint, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all markets operate as efficiently as possible, making it very difficult to sustain a competitive edge.

After our conversations with the CEO, we learned that the cycling industry operates in a unique situation. The industry leader currently benefits from keeping every aspect of e-bike design and manufacturing in-house, and from minimizing compatibility with competing hardware components. As a result, we’ve identified an inherent opportunity for GPS Tuner within the market.

Although our time in Budapest has been short, it has provided a tremendous opportunity for both academic and personal growth. We’ve received excellent feedback from Professor Orban, which has guided our analysis and allowed us to set up a framework for our project going forward.

We are also lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Ivan Pap during our time here at Oriens. He has been a fantastic guide and mentor, and he has made our trip very memorable. Although we are sad to leave the amazing city of Budapest, we are confident in our direction and look forward to diving deeper into the opportunities GPS Tuner faces as it enters its newest growth stage.

Team GPS Turner: MBA students Courtney Callegari, Douglas Mullenix, and Kirtika Singh.

On our second day in Budapest, we made our way to an island in the Danube River called Óbudai-sziget (“Old Buda Island”), for our first meeting with Sziget, our client for the Venture Consulting in Budapest program which is offered every year here at Olin.

Guest Blogger, Ty Holden, MBA’16, is a student in Cliff Holekamp’s Venture Consulting course that works with companies in Budapest, Hungary.

In addition to the incredible opportunity to see and explore Budapest and to gain experience in international business, we were assigned a very exciting project: to develop a strategic plan for attracting more Americans to Sziget Festival, a week-long music and entertainment festival that takes place on Óbudai-sziget every August.

Sziget attracts over 400,000 attendees a year, but essentially all are from Europe. In fact, only an estimated 200 Americans purchased tickets for last year’s festival. The task that we were given was to develop a plan for raising awareness of Sziget in the United States with a stated goal of increasing American attendance to 3,000 by 2018 (a 1500% increase). Sziget wants to diversify the origin of their attendees to protect against isolated economic difficulties and to drive 7-day ticket sales versus single day tickets.

We then had the opportunity to interview the executives of Sziget to explore its current structure, market, and strategies. With the objective and information about the festival in mind, we set out to develop a structure for addressing the problem and eventually for providing a strategic plan. In order to attack this problem, we developed a structure for understanding it called a MECE (“mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive”) tree. It is a process used at McKinsey and taught to us by Professor Orbán in Budapest.

The structure allows you see the problem in its entirety and to test hypotheses that solve it. Our analysis indicated that Sziget’s problem was an awareness issue, and in order to attract more Americans on a tight marketing budget, the probable solution is to employ a very targeted marketing campaign. This raises another challenge, however, in that we must now determine the typical American customer who is interested in the offerings of Sziget and also has the time and money to attend. Once the target customer is identified, we will need to develop a plan for reaching these individuals.

Overall, the week was a great success. Our project was given some much needed context and our interview sessions with the Sziget executives proved invaluable. While we were certainly sad to leave Budapest and all that it has to offer, we are excited to return the United States to continue to work on this exciting, unique project.

After a 40 minute drive out of the city, the team arrived at their destination in Etyek, Hungary, Korda Studios. Korda Studios is a high-tech studio with the third largest sound stage in the world surrounded by the beautiful vineyards of Hungarian wine country. While touring the facilities the team went from 16^th century Rome to the surface of Mars, to a war-torn Brooklyn. As the tour proceeded, we asked questions about the studio and the industry, using the answers to frame a complex business problem.

Renaissance city “set” at Korda Studios

Guest blogger: Max Byers, MBA’16, is a student in Cliff Holekamp’s Venture Consulting course. Student teams travel to Budapest, Hungary to meet with companies to research a consulting project they will complete over the summer.

Using a framework championed by the consulting firm McKinsey, we evaluated the goals of Korda, what the obstacles to achieving those goals are, and how to overcome or eliminate those obstacles. By using the MECE framework, meaning “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive,” the team developed hypotheses about how to overcome or eliminate Korda’s obstacles.

The main questions the team focused on were “What factors contribute to U.S. and U.K. companies filming overseas?”, “What are Korda’s competitive advantages?”, and “How does Korda market to U.S. and U.K. decision makers?”. These questions will be used to guide our project throughout.

Along with the questions guiding research, these questions can be broken down even further, and the answers have helped us gain knowledge about the film and big budget TV industry. For instance, tax incentive schemes for attracting film production vary around the world. Hungary has a 25% “soft-money” scheme that is a tax rebate of 25% of the expenses spent in Hungary, while other countries like the United States offer tax incentives on a state by state basis.

One of the more surprising things we learned is that catering is a big deal in pleasing a movie production once it has decided to film there. According to one interview we did, about 20-25 people in Los Angeles are highly influential in filming decisions, and that there are multiple bids made before a studio is selected in most cases. The film industry can be considered a “word-of-mouth” industry, meaning that studios like Korda must be accommodating and easy to work with.

Overall, using MECE and having those questions guide our future research will help us arrive at a plan for the main question, “How does Korda attract more films to its facilities and Budapest?” The trip to Budapest was very beneficial in framing the project and gaining initial insights.

The project my team and I have been assigned to work on is centered around the growing eBike market in Europe. GPS Tuner, our client, is a big player in Europe in providing GPS navigation to bicycles. GPS Tuner wants us to explore an entry into providing software and GPS to the eBike. In addition, our Hungarian professor Kristian Orban taught, and we successfully applied, a Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive (MECE) framework for the project. That framework allowed us to come up with hypotheses that we will test over the summer to give GPS Tuner the best recommendations when turning in the final project.

Guest Blogger, James Bierman, MBA’16, is a student in Cliff Holekamp’s Venture Consulting course. Student teams are currently working with startups in Budapest, Hungary.

The introduction to the project was very interesting. The CEO of GPS Tuner, Tamas Nagy, made quite the impression when first meeting him. You could tell that he was decisive and strategic. He was a natural salesman and a leader. You could tell that his staff looked up to him. His leadership style reminded me of some of the best styles that I had seen in construction. He might challenge one of his staff. However, he didn’t do it as a commandeering boss, but rather as a way to challenge them to be better. He was leading our team in the same manner and he really inspired us to do a good job.

However, the best part of the project was learning the critical thinking taught by Prof. Orban. I really liked how he focused on the framework to solve all the projects that the teams are doing. It forces us to actually use a formalized framework to solve a problem. Our team actually used the MECE framework and combined it with a “Pick-axe” method taught to us by Prof. Jackson Nickerson. While it seemed less productive at the time, when we were done, we had broken the project into manageable chunks, and we had done so in a completely exhaustive way.

For me, this project and the CELect course have put case studies into perspective. I’ve come to learn from working with these companies that the reason that case studies are so important is because CEO’s have to constantly be solving things analogous to case studies. Strategy can largely consist of addressing these projects as they come up in the company. The projects are the pivots, or the problems that need to be addressed to keep a company growing or accelerating its growth. One day I hope I am the CEO of my own start-up company and what I’ve learned from Professor Orban and Tamas will serve me well.

Pictured above, left to right: Elise Miller, Micah Northcutt, James Bierman, and Charlotte Jones in Budapest.  The first three are MBA students, Charlotte is a BSBA rising senior.  They are posing with an e-bike which is navigated by GPS Tuner software (their client).