The Space Economy (SE) offers a compelling context for advancing research and teaching in Management Education and Development (MED). Near-future challenges such as space tourism, Mars habitats, orbital logistics, and asteroid mining create rich opportunities for students to engage in creativity, systems thinking, and long-term strategy.
For MED scholars, the SE is especially valuable because it sits at the intersection of multiple domains: advanced STEM, business strategy, international policy, ethics, environmental sustainability, and digital transformation. This makes it an ideal setting for cultivating cross-disciplinary thinking, anticipatory problem-solving, ethical reasoning, and the ability to navigate uncertainty—all core competencies in contemporary management education.
The SE also aligns closely with growing interest in futures literacy and strategic foresight. Rather than focusing only on short-term business problems, the SE encourages students to engage with uncertain, long-term societal trajectories and to develop a stronger sense of agency, responsibility, and shared futures. Its inherently multidisciplinary nature makes it a motivating and imaginative domain for preparing future-ready leaders.
At the pedagogical level, the SE opens exciting possibilities for innovative teaching design. Educators can use it as an anchoring theme for simulations, role plays, design sprints, and AI-enabled ideation labs, as well as for approaches that combine science fiction with entrepreneurship education to foster bold futures thinking and opportunity recognition.
Our PDW, Space Economy: Consolidating a Research Agenda, invites MED scholars and educators interested in integrative pedagogies, experiential learning, and future-oriented management education to explore how the SE can enrich teaching design, spark new research directions, and foster collaboration across the community.
📍 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