Business Model Validation in Emerging Industries: Evidence From Space Economy Startups

In the last decade, both scholars and practitioners have devoted attention to the increased wave of digitalization that pervasively tackled the majority of the existing industries and, in some cases, created entirely new competitive arenas. The common trait of this digitalization trend has often been the proposition of innovative business models by startups, challenging the status-quo shaking the rules of competition. However, because of their liability of newness, these new ventures face the issue to convince the market about the quality of their whole offer. With this aim, recent literature of entrepreneurship grew significantly around the concept of business model validation, in particular through experimental approaches generally known as lean startup approaches. Despite their popularity to mitigate the uncertainty related to fast-changing environments, little is known about their application in the extreme context of uncertainty: emerging industries. Through a multiple case-study, this research seeks to contribute to this gap, studying how startups in the New Space Economy tackled the emerging industry originated from deep technological and regulatory changes in the traditional space industry, specifically investigating how they pursued their process of business model validation in such kind of context.