The Space Economy (SE) is creating novel competitive landscapes across aerospace/defense, telecommunications, and adjacent industries, making it a timely and theoretically rich context for the STR Division. Technological advances such as satellite miniaturization and reusable launch systems have lowered entry barriers, accelerated experimentation, and intensified competition among both incumbents and new entrants.
For STR scholars, the SE sharpens classic questions about industry emergence, especially when rivalry, standardization, and co-opetition coexist rather than unfold sequentially. It is also a valuable setting for extending capability-based perspectives under high uncertainty and irreversibility, and for examining how dynamic capabilities and managerial cognition shape strategic adaptation in the face of technological discontinuities.
Many firms in the SE must combine market and non-market strategies while positioning themselves within highly interdependent ecosystems. This makes the sector especially relevant for STR research on ecosystem strategy, value capture, alliance governance, asymmetric dependence, and intellectual property in collaborative innovation. High-profile setbacks also highlight the strategic importance of resilience, learning, and risk governance in extreme contexts.
At the same time, expanding public and commercial data sources create both opportunities and methodological challenges for studying strategy in frontier industries. The SE thus offers a powerful empirical setting for building and testing theory on competition, adaptation, ecosystem dynamics, and strategic change.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for STR scholars to translate these phenomena into research designs, clarifying constructs, boundary conditions, and feasible data strategies for theory development and testing.
📍 PDW at AOM 2026: Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda
🗓 August 1, 2026 | 2:00–5:30 PM
📌 Loews Hotel, Philadelphia, USA
🔗 Register (open until sold out): https://lnkd.in/e3czZT4R
📩 Questions: Mehdi.montakhabi@said.oxford.edu
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Mehdi Montakhabi
Associate Scholar
University of Oxford | Saïd Business School
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