Corporate Agility - A Framework to Compete in High-Velocity Markets

Over the past 30 years, strategic and operating conditions have become increasingly turbulent for private industrial companies. The main causes were factors such as hyper-competition, increasing customer demands, regulatory changes, and/or technological advancements. Consequently, the ability to sense these changes and respond readily became an important determinant for firm success. Simultaneously, the question of how to describe and develop this kind of ability became a dominant topic for both scholars (particularly related to management science) and practitioners along all hierarchy levels. As a result, the notion of enterprise agility is among the most predominant and popular approaches of how organisations can successfully establish such ability in order to deal with dynamic and constantly changing environments. Considering contemporary firms and current impacts like the COVID-19 pandemic, extremely tensed global supply chains, and geopolitical events like the Russian invasion into the Ukraine, one could assume that the concept of agility is of unprecedented relevance. Therefore, this study aims to understand how agility is constituted in a corporate context, what are the main enablers behind, and in particular what are the maturity levels within these enablers. The primary scope is related to the automotive supplier industry, as this sector is facing a transformation like never before. A pragmatist philosophical position has been characterised to be appropriate for conducting the research, as the main goal was to translate the collected management knowledge into efficacious practical realisation. The study has found the logic of maturity models as suitable in order to develop an appropriate framework and concludes with the Maturity Model of Corporate Agility. Following this, agility is characterised by six key elements: two first-order capabilities and four second-order capabilities. These are grounded in a set of 30 enablers. Each of them has been defined from poor or rudimentary practice to best practice while the different levels automatically indicate the progression on the improvement path. Even if the developed maturity model might be limited in its applicability to other industries beyond automotive, practitioners can apply this framework as a managerial tool to manoeuvre in today’s high-velocity markets.