Abstract
Despite a rich legacy of space sector technological achievements, agencies are increasingly being criticized for their inability to deliver on their innovative promises. Although the phenomenon of innovation has received substantial attention across multiple disciplines, it has largely focused on relatively simple products in nearly competitive markets, making its applicability to the space system context suspect. This paper reviews the economic, political science/strategic, business and operational literatures most relevant to complex product innovation in government markets. It categorizes their insights in terms of the sources of innovation as – external political-level leadership, internal bureaucratic politics, structure of the system, new technologies and user innovations – to illustrate the overlap and gaps among the disciplinary insights. It argues that past studies have over emphasized innovations that were generated by idiosyncratic events and have not adequately addressed the architectural dimension of complex product innovation. If useful prescriptions are to be developed, the process of normal complex product innovation in monopsony markets must be examined as a whole. To this end, the paper suggests several priorities for future work.
Published Version
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