This study focuses on examining firms’ strategic representations of their imagined futures. Most studies in the current literature on strategic representations center on representations of existing environments where firms’ strategies are enacted, emphasizing factors such as accuracy, fit with the environment, and optimal representational complexity. However, this paper contends that understanding how firms make choices also requires studying their representations of the not-yet-existent – or their imagined futures. In other words, to gain deeper insight into how firms make choices, it is important to consider not only their representations of the current environment but also their representations of imagined futures. This exploratory study takes an initial step in analyzing firms’ representations of the not-yet-existent (imagined futures) and explores how these future representations relate to firms’ technological choices. The study draws on data from multiple industries within the Space economy and employs the theoretical lens of counterfactual imagination.
