Investigating Project Front-end Practices for Aligning Potential and Enacted Value of Space Projects

The space sector is unveiling unprecedented levels of potential value. Satellite services and applications provide benefits to an ever-expanding number of institutional and private users. Nevertheless, there exists a misalignment between the potential value offered by space infrastructures and the enacted value realized by users. The front-end of projects offers prime opportunity to collaboratively shape the project success with primary and secondary stakeholders, thereby bridging the gap between potential and enacted value. Space project practices have not embraced yet such an evolution towards a wider stakeholder engagement perspective. Therefore, users' needs are weakly addressed and included in the design of space projects. Through secondary data and the organization of a formal workshop gathering space organizations and users, we examine the factors determining potential and enacted value misalignment through a New Stakeholder Theory (NST) lens. To seek insights for solutions, we delve deep into project management studies to identify how similar challenges are addressed.