The Historical Retrospect of an Overlooked Business Opportunity Within the Aerospace Sector

The aerospace sector is a dynamic, highly technology-driven industry with a remarkable societal impact. Partially fueled by air transportation and space exploration, the United States aerospace and defense industry generated 143 billion worth in exports in 2017. In light of conventional marketing and management practices pertaining to product development, traditional, non-adaptive product life-cycle management often falls short in this industry, explicitly under circumstances when the customer experience is neglected on a holistic level. Notably, such an approach could indeed result in overlooked business opportunities and strategic planning inconsistencies. In this paper, a specific overlooked aerospace business opportunity is dissected with objectives to depict the potential existence of secondary markets and to suggest a holistic approach to product life-cycle management.