“I believe that digital and software engineering are the closest things to magic in the tech world,” says Gyorgy Buslig. “Through mastering a new way of thinking, and ‘casting spells’ when writing code, we can create something new, seemingly out of thin air, that solves problems and can bring people closer together at work and in life.”
Gyorgy is the founder of IncepTech, a firm that develops digital products and businesses. He and his partners Daniel Schay and Aron Antal are all McKinsey alumni, and they bring their team of 60+ experts—along with their transformative powers in software engineering, digital expertise, and business building—to McKinsey Digital this month. They will form the core of a new studio in Budapest, fast becoming a center of technology innovation in Europe, and focus on helping clients with their digital transformations. It will be our fourth McKinsey Digital studio in Europe, in addition to London, Berlin, and Stockholm, encompassing 500+ digital, technology, design, and analytics experts across the continent.
Businesses have been digitizing for over a decade, but COVID-19 has acted as an accelerant, spurring five to ten years of digital adoption across a matter of months. Incremental transformations are no longer enough; companies have to make fundamental changes to how they work, and technologies such as cloud, AI, and blockchain are advancing so quickly that any digitization initiative is becoming much more complex.
The acquisition further deepens our technical delivery capabilities, along with our recent acquisitions of Candid for cloud and Hypothesis for software engineering and Agile.
“With IncepTech’s technology leadership and deep engineering skills,” says Paul Jenkins, a senior partner and head of McKinsey Digital in Europe, “we can significantly grow what we are already doing: mobilizing small, highly-skilled teams to help clients build digital products, channels, and businesses.” The Budapest studio aims to grow significantly from IncepTech’s base by recruiting some of the leading engineers and digital consultants from across Europe.
“In our studios, which are McKinsey Digital expert communities, cross-functional teams help clients solve their hardest, make-or-break challenges, often on very tight timelines, working in a fast and agile way,” explains Chris Smith, a McKinsey partner in London who helps lead the McKinsey Digital studio network in Europe. According to Chris, teams also create new tools; build accelerators, such as the digital skeleton of a retail outlet or a branch bank; and work side-by-side with clients to develop in-house capabilities.
McKinsey has collaborated with IncepTech on projects such as helping a fast-growing real estate agency build a digital-service ecosystem to significantly increase earnings; and working with a leading expedition cruise company to develop their digital distribution platforms for travel agents and customers.
“We share a similar commitment to our clients and an urgency to deliver value,” says Chris. “Our teams will be 100 percent integrated from the start, and our IncepTech colleagues, by joining McKinsey, will have the opportunity to work on some of the most intriguing digital challenges today.”
We share a similar commitment to our clients and an urgency to deliver value.
Chris Smith, McKinsey partner
Another trait McKinsey and IncepTech share is a focus on people. “IncepTech develops early-tenure people into very high-caliber engineering experts and digital consultants within a relatively short time,” says Chris. “That’s unique in the market and hard to do—and very much the way we work.”
“When we first started our firm,” says Gyorgy, “we wanted to create a culture that merged the worlds of technology and business. It’s not just consultants and engineers who work together—but engineers who want to be digital business leaders, and business consultants who love this world of technology, and want to understand the inner workings of all things.”
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