Global Economic Trends and their Impact to Corporate Development

Without a doubt, Global Economic Trends have sustainably changed today's economic and socioeconomic landscape, and the transformational power of GETs will drive industries and markets to a new secular destination. However, there are substantial uncertainties over future economic growth, arising from the complex interplay of domestic and global determinants, including such diverse factors as demographics, advances in technology, capital availability, scarcity of resources, domestic policies and global trade, regimes, environmental policies and financial regulations. Aligning the right information to successfully plan and to implement management principles is challenging to corporations, especially when addressing resource and investment decisions. Therefore, corporations need to establish organizational measures to incorporate the risks associated to GETs into the strategic management process, and to avoid harm to the corporate portfolio. The scientific contribution of this thesis is a tool called GET assessment framework, which can be applied within strategic business planning to tackle risks associated to GETs. The intent of the tool is to analyze the impact of a trend to the actual business situation of the corporation, and to help the management to formulate and to establish counter measures within a scenario planning. To prove its applicability, the GET scarcity of resources is used to demonstrate how the shortage of oil is affecting a virtual corporation that is operating within the chemical industry, which is a recent problem to business planning in the industry. Using the concept of corporate evaluation, which is introduced within the assessment framework, potential risks are identified. By this means, external risks are mapped to the internal environment of the corporation and countermeasures are developed.