Emerging Technologies as Enabler of Sustainable Business Model Innovation: Evidence from Space Tech New Ventures

Abstract

The growing humanitarian and environmental challenges our planet and society are facing today made the United Nations ratify the so-called 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which encapsulates 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the aim of promoting social, environmental, and economic objectives. For commercial companies, embarking into sustainability is not an easy task, because of different tensions between profit and impact that make it difficult to fully align the commercial activities with the sustainability ones within the company’s business model. By mean of a multiple-case study analyzing 11 startups in the New Space Economy domain, this research sheds light on the use of the emerging satellite technology as enabler of sustainable business model innovation, adopting a technology-perspective in the mitigation of the so-called transaction obstacles to sustainability, making it clear how emerging technologies’ features may represent a solution to embed SDGs in firms’ business model.