The steadily accelerating globalization has given the means and motivation for companies to find new market opportunities and thus enter new markets. In order to minimize the risks involved in such activity and assess the size of the opportunity it is essential to conduct market opportunity analysis on the desired target market. Success in a market requires the knowledge on internal and external factors affecting market opportunity as well as the ability to understand target market’s needs and preferences. This way the customer value can be maximized and a mutually beneficial relationship is created.

The objective of this thesis is to determine what kind of market opportunities there are for engineering services in the Polish energy and mining industries and how they should be pursued. The study was conducted as an empirical qualitative case study using referee-articles, Internet, qualitative interviews and surveys as a source of information. The framework created for this thesis can be used by companies to understand market opportunities in a given market and, thus, improve their value creation abilities and possibilities to succeed there.

The study concluded that the Polish market is still quite traditional in terms of the use of the transactional approach in make-or-buy-decisions. However, the industries are currently in the discontinuity phase where they must choose whether they will move to the new practices or alternatively disappear from the market. This may offer a market opportunity to educate the target market and thus create them value.

The results of the study raised many interesting topics for further research. The most interesting one is the question why cooperation between companies and universities is not widely used in Poland and whether there would be a possibility to gain any benefits from such an activity. Moreover, the thesis raised the question whether the results of the study can be generalized for different industries