Business model innovation in emerging industries: A taxonomy of space economy startups

Despite the inner interest of humankind toward space exploration, space business has been for a long time a matter for public institutions and space agencies only, mainly due to the strict regulations put in place and its inner technological complexity. This equilibrium has been changed in the last years because of a number of historical novelties, in particular because of revolutionary changes at the regulatory level and a continuous advancement for a technological perspective, lowering the main barriers to access the industry. These recent changes are redesigning the boundaries of the traditional space industry, today more broadly renamed as Space Economy and considered “the final economic frontier”. With an estimated multi-trillion value in the next two decades, a large of number of entrepreneurial ventures have been recently established to grasp the different market opportunities risen. Because of the innovative nature of startups, often the first vehicle of novelty, we have conducted a first analysis on the business models implemented by these new Space Economy startups. Scholars devoted attention to business model in the last two decades because of its versatility and generalizability, and it is today largely accepted in academia as the representation of the firm’s value architecture and the implementation of the firm’s realized strategy. Building on prior literature of space, we defined a number of business model building blocks to introduce in our analysis, theoretically linked with the established mechanisms of value creation, value delivery and value capture from business model theory. We created a proprietary database of Space Economy startups, thus collecting data about their business model from both primary and secondary sources. We then present a taxonomy of six business model archetypes for these innovative startups operating in the Space Economy domain, classified according to their value proposition and target markets. Both scholars and practitioner may gain relevant insights from this study, with a first taxonomy of business models in an emerging industry originated from a transformation of the prior configuration and the most common architecture implemented in a fast-growing market that may suggest guidelines for private investments and new economic growth policies.