The Space Economy (SE) is emerging as a distinctive context for advancing research in Entrepreneurship (ENT). Once shaped primarily by state-led activity, it is now increasingly a frontier market in which startups, incumbents, and agencies jointly build technologies, standards, and demand.
What makes the SE especially relevant for ENT is that it foregrounds entrepreneurial action under extreme uncertainty, high capital intensity, long development horizons, and dual-use constraints. These conditions sharpen core debates around opportunity creation versus discovery, entrepreneurial judgment under uncertainty, and how founders commit early, learn under constrained experimentation, and sustain credibility when failure can be binary rather than incremental.
The SE is also a natural laboratory for studying entrepreneurial ecosystems and market construction. Entry, scaling, and value capture are shaped by coordinated investments among launch providers, satellite manufacturers, data-platform firms, prime contractors, regulators, venture capital, and accelerators, often through hybrid public–private arrangements. Because architectures are tightly coupled and certification and procurement can be gatekept, founders need to mobilize complementary assets, negotiate dependencies, and coordinate roles before markets and governance regimes stabilize.
This PDW will explore how the SE can help us theorize ecosystem emergence, power asymmetries, institutional evolution, and responsible innovation, especially as space entrepreneurship increasingly engages grand challenges such as climate monitoring and connectivity equity. For ENT scholars, the SE offers an opportunity not only to study an emerging sector, but also to refine and extend entrepreneurship theory in a frontier context.
📍 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