Over the past decades, the Space Economy (SE) has shifted from a government-dominated sector to a rapidly expanding ecosystem shaped by public–private partnerships and commercial investment. This transformation is creating organizations that blend public-sector mandates such as safety, national capability, and accountability with private-sector priorities of innovation, speed, and risk-taking.
For HR scholars, this makes the SE a compelling context for examining how people systems function when goals, incentives, and constraints are hybrid rather than purely market- or state-driven. As the SE continues to grow across commercial, civil, defense, manufacturing, and digital service applications, demand is rising for highly specialized talent and stronger forms of cross-boundary coordination.
The SE depends on highly skilled engineers, analysts, system designers, and mission operations teams whose work requires substantial training and sustained performance under uncertainty, time pressure, and high consequence. In this environment, HR practices can materially shape both innovation and operational outcomes, as turnover, performance shortfalls, or skill gaps can cascade into mission delays, safety risks, and major cost escalation.
This makes the SE a strong empirical setting for advancing HR research on strategic workforce planning, capability development, retention, and high-consequence performance management. It also sharpens international and cross-sector HR questions, as work is distributed across jurisdictions, institutional logics, and security/regulatory regimes, raising important issues around staffing and mobility, knowledge transfer, and the governance of people practices across complex partnerships and supply networks.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, will provide a forum for HR scholars interested in talent pipelines, learning systems, cross-boundary coordination, and HR architectures for reliability-demanding work in this rapidly evolving sector.
📍 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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