The interplay between government and industry in the Space Economy (SE) creates a compelling context for research and practice in the Management Consulting (MC) Division. As public–private partnerships, technological change, and regulatory adaptation reshape the sector, the SE offers a rich setting for understanding how complex industries emerge and evolve over time.
For MC scholars and practitioners, the SE highlights the importance of combining variance research and process research. Variance approaches help identify structural patterns, resource dependencies, and predictive relationships in government–industry collaborations such as space infrastructure partnerships. Process approaches, by contrast, are essential for understanding the dynamic, nonlinear, and path-dependent development of phenomena such as technology diffusion, regulatory change, and sector emergence.
Taken together, these complementary lenses offer a more complete understanding of how the space sector develops under conditions shaped by policy shocks, strategic alignments, and evolving institutional arrangements. For management consultants, this means balancing predictive models with narrative insight in order to craft strategies that account for both broad structural trends and the idiosyncratic trajectories of a rapidly evolving field.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for MC members to reflect on the strengths and limitations of these methodological approaches, and to explore how integrating them can generate a more holistic understanding of complex organizational and social phenomena 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
------------------------------
Mehdi Montakhabi
Associate Scholar
University of Oxford | Saïd Business School
------------------------------