The influence of macroenvironment changes on agility of enterprise

Abstract

In spite of different understanding of agility the dominating viewpoint is that agile enterprise is focused on using opportunities. Opportunity is a situation existing in the enterprise’s environment that favours the enterprise achieving its goals with use of disposable resources. On the base of open systems theory commonly accepted in strategic management the business environmental changes can be recognized by the enterprise either as opportunities or threats. In this paper the focus is on influence of macroenvironment on opportunities. The undertaken problem is if turbulences in macroenvironment result in enterprise shift to agility. As a measure of this shift, some of the company’s activities were taken that are symptoms of its agility. To get an answer for the research problem the macroenvironment have been segmented according to PEST analysis and for each segment factors potentially influencing the enterprise’s opportunity has been defined. Statistical data about the value of these factors and the symptoms of opportunities were used, their reliability was checked as a measure of changes in the environment and occurrence of opportunities and their correlation was analyzed. The study has been run internationally however in this paper only data from two countries are presented. The results indicate the crucial macroenvironmental factors affecting the shift to agility. Such results can be useful for managers who are interested to exploit market opportunities by shaping their businesses agile.