Shaping, a strategic approach to transforming an existing competitive landscape into a preferred one, involves creating novel strategies to develop radically new technologies and innovative business models under high uncertainty. Despite increasing scholarly work, we have little insight into how a firm navigates the uncertainties emerging from its shaping intentions, and how it enables its strategy that may require unprecedented knowledge, resources, and stakeholder support. Our analysis of SpaceX uncovers the layers of its mission to make life multiplanetary, the resulting uncertainties, the company’s response, and its capabilities. Central to its response was its incremental-yet-rapid building block approach—a method of systematically creating, extending, and combining operational capabilities to develop increasingly powerful products, facilitating significant gains in learning, funding, and legitimacy. To enable this, SpaceX leveraged three types of organizational capabilities that we term moonshot thinking, bottleneck engineering, and ambidextrous scaling. We demonstrate a mutual reinforcement between SpaceX’s building block approach as its shaping activity and organizational capabilities as its shaping capacity, that collectively led to crucial innovations and the realization of its audacious intentions. Our study contributes to research on novel strategies under uncertainty, industry shaping, as well as organizational capabilities in shaping and their co-evolution with operational capabilities.
