Creating and Claiming Social Value by Joining the Governance of Science-Driven Capital Projects: An Investigation in the New Space Economy

In a world facing grand challenges, companies are urged to create and claim social value. This article explains how organizations can achieve this by joining the governance of science-driven capital projects. The article addresses two significant gaps: the limited academic understanding of how science-driven capital projects create social value and the empirical lack of guidelines for companies to harness these projects. The empirical setting is the space sector, specifically the International Space Station (ISS) project. We adopted a two-stage research design. First, based on public documents and reports, we investigated the governance and social value of projects developed on the ISS, finding that social value is created through “In-Space” and “On-Earth” projects. Second, we performed a thematic analysis of 18 semistructured interviews with senior managers, obtaining a roadmap to create and claim social value by joining the governance of the ISS. The article contributes to the theory by explaining how science-driven capital projects create social value and their key governance elements. We show that space is becoming accessible to many nonspace companies. We contribute to practice by clarifying the main governance elements of science-driven capital projects and providing a roadmap to create and claim social value by joining their governance.