Leveraging local advantages abroad in volatile markets: Enka Engineering and Construction

Hello, my name is Ismail Golgeci. I am an Associate Professor at Department of Business Development and Technology in Aarhus University. Today, I'm going to talk about the case of Enka and the title will be: leveraging local advantages abroad in volatile markets: Enka Engineering and Construction.

This talk will revolve around the following agenda. First, I will start talking about surviving and thriving in volatile markets. That's actually a project and a paper that I developed with my colleagues and during the development of that paper, I encountered Enka Engineering. I knew about Enka Engineering before when I was in college. Actually, some of my friends worked and did their internships there. I have some background knowledge, but when I was working on my paper, I thought Enka would be a good example of that. I will start with the paper's short introduction as a background for Enka Engineering. Then, I will talk about Enka Engineering- its history; its background. Then, I will move on to Enka's way of steering in emerging markets. Then, I will talk about the longevity and expansion of Enka in volatile markets. Finally, we will finish up with lessons learned.

Let's start by talking about surviving and thriving volatile markets. As you may know, recently the whole world is going through a lot of turbulence, a lot of volatility coming from different forces. It could be either political or social or technological, even health-related. With the recent emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. More businesses realized that two key capabilities are becoming important. One of them is resilience, the other is agility. Both of these capabilities are relevant to stay afloat and respond to external changes in an effective and positive way. My colleagues and I have been working on a paper about surviving and thriving in volatile markets. We studied concepts of resilience and agility and developed a new concept of resilience agility as ambidextrous scalability that would enable companies to survive in volatile markets. A little bit of background with those concepts. We could say resilience and agility are both critical, but neither of them are the most effective option to both survive and thrive in the face of unprecedented complexity and unpredictability. Because resilience eventually is about survival and it's mostly devoid of thriving. On the other hand, agility is mostly about short-term thriving, and it may come at the expense of long-term survival. There is an African proverb. If you want to go long, go together; if you're going to go quick, go alone. There is a sense of trade-off between agility and resilience in that regard. But, this suggests that when companies are operating in turbulent, trying, and sometimes, distressing conditions they may develop unique capabilities that would enable them to survive in those conditions. But, this has been received scant attention. I will just move on to explain the framework shortly before I start talking about Enka.