p-compact groups as framed manifolds

We describe a natural way to associate to any p-compact group an element of the p-local stable stems, which, applied to the p-completion of a compact Lie group G, coincides with the element represented by the manifold G with its left-invariant framing. To this end, we construct a d-dimensional sphere SG with a stable G-action for every d-dimensional p-compact group G, which generalizes the one-point compactification of the Lie algebra of a Lie group. The homotopy class represented by G is then constructed by means of a transfer map between the Thom spaces of spherical fibrations over BG associated with SG.