Meenal Banga
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Texas at Austin
Hello and welcome!
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Management at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, currently on the academic job market for 2025–2026.
I study counterfactual imagination in the space industry, and my dissertation work is shortlisted as one of eight finalists for the 2025 INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition.
Outside academia, I am a proud dog mom to two wonderful pups, Einstein and Dora.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing this journey with me!
Research
Organizations today increasingly operate in environments marked by high uncertainty—driven by rapid technological change, unforeseen market shifts, institutional volatility, and expanding time horizons of economic activity. In such settings, traditional predictive approaches to strategy, which are grounded in historical precedent, reliable data, and stable causal mechanisms, often fall short. As a result, firms are compelled to turn to imaginative strategies that construct and articulate futures not anchored in present realities. In my primary stream of research, I examine how firms can strategically harness the structure of imagination to shape the future to their advantage. Drawing on insights from cognitive science and psychology, I engage with imagination as a phenomenon with an underlying structure—one that, I argue, can be approached as a skill: learnable, practicable, and applicable in strategic contexts. I study these questions in the context of the Space industry, where the vast expanse of time and space offers a unique vantage point for exploring how imagination operates under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This industry’s unique challenges and radical aspirations make it a fertile setting for exploring how structured imagination can be applied not only to anticipate, but also to construct, future possibilities.
In a second stream of work, I study open innovation—specifically, how firms evaluate externally sourced ideas and the cognitive biases that shape this process. These biases have a lasting impact on the trajectory of technological development, and understanding them can inform more effective approaches to evaluation of externally sourced ideas.
My research is unified by a focus on cognitive foundations—how cognition shapes strategy, innovation, and stakeholder engagement—with a particular interest in accessing cognition through language use. This intersection of cognition and language reflects a deeper interest in how mental processes surface in the discursive practices through which the future is imagined, evaluated, and acted upon.
Thank you for visiting. I look forward to sharing my work with you.
Creating a Road to Space: Counterfactual Imagination and the Creation of Futures in the Space Economy (Job Market Paper)
. Abstract: How do imagined futures move from firm-generated representations into the imaginative processes of stakeholders? While prior research has explored how imagined futures are made to appear credible through narrative structure, symbolic elements, and alignment with cultural frames, less is known about how these representations engage stakeholders’ own imaginative capacities. In this paper, I address this question by studying how firm leaders in the Space economy construct counterfactual worlds—representations of alternative futures designed to guide action in the absence of precedent or material grounding. Drawing on the literature on counterfactual imagination, I inductively identify features of these worlds that take into account the imaginative capacities of stakeholders. I also examine a cognitive mechanism—suspension of disbelief—that enables stakeholders to temporarily engage with these imagined futures as if they were real. In doing so, this study contributes to emerging research on imagination in strategy by offering a microfoundational account of how imagined futures become performative and by theorizing how firms structure counterfactual worlds to shape the future to their advantage.
Why Entrepreneurs Need Fiction: How Fictional Framing Bridges the Imaginary and the Possible (with Luis Martins & Violina Rindova)
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Revise & Resubmit, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal – Special Issue on Framing Novelty
. Abstract: Entrepreneurial framing is recognized as important to legitimating novel ideas, but extant research provides limited guidance on how entrepreneurs may frame radically novel concepts that present significant departures from the status-quo. Because radical novelty poses distinct legitimation challenges, we propose fictional framing—defined as the use of fictionalizing principles and techniques to represent non-existent realities—as an approach to addressing them. Drawing on work on the theory and psychology of fiction, we theorize how entrepreneurs can construct fictional framing and how it influences specific stakeholder cognitions that facilitate the legitimation of radically novel ideas. We discuss the implications of our framework for broadening the entrepreneurial framing toolkit, understanding audiences’ role in co-producing futures, and the impact of entrepreneurs as producers of culture.
Harnessing the Structure of Counterfactual Imagination to Narratively Shape the Future (Dissertation Paper; with Luis Martins & Violina Rindova)
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Awarded “Most Novel Proposal,” Behavioral Strategy Interest Group, SMS 2024
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Selected as one of the eight most innovative and high interest papers by Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) Division of the Academy of Management for Tuesday Coolness Presentations, AOM Copenhagen, 2025
. Abstract: This paper submits that there are two key tasks in shaping the future to a firm’s advantage—imagining a preferred version of the future and persuading stakeholders of this imagined future by deeming it plausible in a way that it becomes imaginatively accessible to them. While extant research offers multiple perspectives on how strategists can render their imagined futures more plausible in the eyes of stakeholders, they collectively emphasize how imagined futures are constructed and assessed, rather than how imagined futures are related to the present reality. What is less explored is how firms might render the future more plausible by orienting it toward the current reality. This would involve harnessing assessments of ‘what is’ as a foundation of ‘what is to be’. This paper draws from the literature on counterfactual imagination to articulate how assessments of modifications of present reality—which involve structured imagination—can enhance the plausibility of imagined futures.
Projecting Imagined Value Games and the Shaping of Future Possibilities (with Luis Martins & Violina Rindova)
. Abstract: A growing body of research looks beyond competitive models to incorporate collaboration with stakeholders into firm strategies for value creation and capture. However, existing research has largely overlooked the challenges associated with coordinating stakeholder actions with a focus on the future as the temporal horizon of action. This paper proposes the concept of imagined value games (IVGs) as a type of economic imaginary that serves as a structuring mechanism to coordinate and shape firm-stakeholder relations in future value-creating coalitions. The paper also suggests that firms can mobilize stakeholder commitment to their preferred futures through discursive means that influence the conceivability, believability, and desirability of their projected futures. This involves incorporating fiction into their narratives about their preferred futures to shape stakeholder perceptions of future possibilities.
Looking for Stars: How NASA Selects External Proposals for Innovation (with Ram Ranganathan)
. Abstract: This paper examines the challenges faced by organizations in evaluating externally generated ideas, particularly in extra-organizational contexts such as crowdsourcing. While external sourcing of ideas has been shown to be an important avenue for firms to overcome organizational inertia, this paper argues that the evaluation of externally sourced ideas is equally important. Specifically, we examine how an organization's internal interdependencies affect how it evaluates ideas submitted by a diverse crowd of firms. Using data from the NASA Small Business Innovation Research program, this paper seeks to provide insights into the evaluation process of organizations when they source ideas from a large unbounded set of unknown collaborators and highlights the limitations of crowdsourcing for innovation ideas.
Organizational Intent to Learn: Harnessing Loss Frame and Social Proof for the Inflation Reduction Act (with John Patrick Akinyemi, Yunxiang Bai, Junyeon Rhee, Tianyu Zhou, Daniel Nielson)
. Abstract: This study examined the effect of loss framing and social proof on small firms' learning intent about the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), focusing on green-technology tax incentives. A 2x2 factorial field experiment involving 46,843 emails to 17,083 companies showed no significant effect of these strategies on learning intent. However, insights from 14 interviews with firm representatives identified four key conceptual themes related to learning intent, barriers, and outcomes in this context. Notably, many firms were more influenced by perceived indirect benefits of the IRA, like partnerships, than by direct incentives – underscoring the limited impact of traditional framing in the climate-change context. Practically, our study serves as an information resource by providing firms with a concise 8-page IRA Executive Summary and our results strongly indicate to climate policymakers that traditional communication strategies may fall short in invoking intent to learn. Furthermore, the study’s contributions include testing green nudges and framing in real settings and expanding organizational learning literature by investigating learning intent at the firm level.