The Space Economy (SE) is an inherently international domain, making it a compelling context for advancing research in International Management (IM). Missions, infrastructures, and value chains span jurisdictions, cultures, and regulatory regimes, while strategic rivalry coexists with sustained cross-border collaboration.
For IM scholars, the SE offers a high-salience setting to explore core questions under unusually sharp boundary conditions. As commercialization accelerates, private actors and multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly shaping how space-based capabilities are financed, governed, and integrated into terrestrial markets and global supply chains. At the same time, fragmented regulation, dual-use sensitivities, evolving standards, and ambiguous property-rights and liability arrangements complicate contracting, location choices, knowledge transfer, and legitimacy-building across borders.
These features make the SE especially valuable for examining how MNEs configure and govern international R&D alliances, manage cross-border ecosystem interdependence among agencies, primes, startups, and platforms, and navigate institutional complexity when “distance” is simultaneously geographic, political, and technological. The SE also invites refinement of foundational international business frameworks, especially where irreversibility is high, coordination is multi-party, and governance is shaped by evolving international arrangements and national policy divergence.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for IM scholars interested in internationalization into frontier domains, cross-border governance of emerging ecosystems, and the co-evolution of global institutions and firm strategy in the Space Economy.
📍 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