The Space Economy (SE) is catalyzing a new wave of digital transformation, making it a compelling context for advancing research in the CTO Division. As firms increasingly rely on space-derived data and services for business intelligence and operational decision-making, the SE is becoming an important setting for examining how technology-enabled capabilities generate competitive advantage.
For CTO scholars, the SE offers a timely empirical context for studying how organizations build and reconfigure capabilities across people, process, and technology. This includes questions of upskilling, governance routines, and integration architectures that connect space-based inputs with existing digital stacks. As business ecosystems extend into orbital environments, digital infrastructures must increasingly operate under tight constraints and with limited direct human intervention.
The SE also raises important questions about how platforms and infrastructures evolve when terrestrial systems become interdependent with autonomous, space-based components. Emerging developments such as orbital data centers, satellite-enabled connectivity, and experiments in blockchain decentralization illustrate how the SE is reshaping digital architectures and expanding the boundaries of business ecosystems.
At the same time, the SE intensifies core CTO concerns around technological diffusion, commercialization from experimentation to scalable deployment, coordination across public–private partnerships, and governance shaped by interoperability, regulatory alignment, and international collaboration. It also foregrounds broader questions of responsible innovation, including how sustainability, accessibility, and accountability are designed into shared digital infrastructures whose benefits and risks are unevenly distributed.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for CTO scholars to translate these emerging issues into research designs with clear constructs, boundary conditions, and feasible data strategies.
📍 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