Another international field of teams from around the world began the challenge of managing their Global Construction Business, a journey that would ultimately lead to one of them being crowned the Enginuity 2025, and 16th Enginuity Champions!

The ENGINUITY Competition is not designed to be an easy challenge, and is intended to reflect how difficult it can be to run a multinational construction business in the real world. To be successful will require an effective business strategy to identify new work, secure the work in a competitive bidding environment, and then manage jobs progressed profitably, dealing with the many problems that will arise, such as job delays and managing risk. There will be many ups and downs, and excellent leadership and management skills will be needed to deal with adversity, and keep the business growing.

And so to the early action, and over 99% of the teams were able to post positive growth figures in period 5, and the top of the early leaderboard is dominated by teams from North Amercia and India. The early pacesetters, and flying high at the top are the "CEPTIANS" (AtkinsRealis, India) with 1,362 pts, but they cannot rest on their laurels with the chasing pack close not far behind, led by the "The Stantec Strategy Squad" (Stantec, India) in 2nd, and only 2 points further back "Hatchico" (Hatch, Canada) in 3rd, followed by two more teams from Stantec, "Stantec DPGenuity" (Stantec, Canada) and "Standard Deviation" (Stantec, Canada), as as the reigning sponsor Champions attempt to emulate the success of "Whatever It Takes" in 2024. It is tight at the top with only 65 points separating the top 12 teams going into the second round, and many teams lying in wait should the leading teams slip us.

And a word of caution to the leading teams, and hope for those lower down the leaderboard. The top teams at the end of the first round normally have high workloads after successful bidding, and their infrastructure size then limits their ability to win a high volume of work in period 6, as well as giving them the 'growing pains' of needing lots of additional labour to handle the additional workload. In contrast, those who did not perhaps start too well are in the reverse position, and can improve their forward workload and margin significantly in the second round, providing, of course, they set competitive bids. It should be a very interesting leaderboard again in the next round!