Verge Aero: When Innovation Takes Flight

The case follows Nils Thorjussen, cofounder and chief executive of Verge Aero, as the company builds and scales a business focused on drone shows for live entertainment. Verge Aero entered an emerging market with few precedents and, as competition increased, moved from producing its own shows to evaluating strategic choices about its long-term direction as a technology provider. The case examines tradeoffs between maintaining a vertically integrated approach and shifting toward software licensing, as well as how falling hardware costs, regulatory considerations, and customer expectations influence business model design. It situates these decisions within the broader challenge of building and scaling a company in a nascent technology-enabled industry.