Larissa Rabbiosi

Organizing for External Knowledge Sourcing

The aim of this article is to provide an introduction to the special issue. We briefly consider the external knowledge sourcing and organizing for innovation literatures, which offer a background for the special issue, and we highlight their mutual dialogue. We then illustrate the main findings of the papers included in the special issue.

Outward FDI from the BRICs: Trends and Patterns of Acquisitions in Advanced Countries

In the last few decades, emerging markets have been characterized by liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) regimes, governance reforms, deregulation, and the general adoption of market-oriented policies. This major process has posed a number of challenges for emerging firms, which have been increasingly exposed to competition from foreign firms and to the pressure of global economic integration. In this scenario, outward foreign direct investments (OFDIs) from emerging countries grew rapidly and assumed a strategic role, representing 16 per cent of global OFDI flows in 2008 and 28 per cent in 2010 (UNCTAD, 2011). OFDIs are also earning increasing attention in the International Business (IB) literature (Luo and Tung, 2007; Sauvant, 2008; Athreye and Kapur, 2009) for three reasons. Firstly, they are a recent and growing phenomenon that still has to be fully described and understood (Hoskisson et ah, 2000; Sauvant, 2005). Secondly, they originate from countries and firms that do not easily fit into the traditional theoretical frameworks adopted to explain OFDIs from advanced countries (Mathews, 2006; Li, 2007; Rugman, 2007; Kalotay, 2008). Thirdly, their impact on the host and home countries still needs to be fully investigated (UNCTAD, 2005b; Goldstein, 2007).

When in Rome, do as the Romans do: Subsidiary Autonomy as a Response to Corruption Distance

Research on the HQ-subsidiary relationship that has studied the allocation of decision-making authority within the HQ-subsidiary dyad (i.e. subsidiary autonomy) in relation to the local context has...

Learning-By-Being-Acquired: Post-Acquisition R&D Team Reorganization and Knowledge Transfer

In horizontal acquisitions, the post-acquisition integration of the R&D function often damages the inventive labor force and results in lower innovative productivity of acquired inventors. In this paper we study post-acquisition integration in terms of R&D team reorganization-i.e., the creation of new teams with both inventors of the acquiring and acquired firms-and assess the impact of this integration action in the period that immediately follows the acquisition. Drawing on social identity and self-categorization theories, we argue that R&D team reorganization increases the acquired inventors’ use of the prior stock of technological knowledge of the acquiring firm after the acquisition. Furthermore, this effect is enhanced if the focal acquired inventor has high relative innovation ability but is weakened for acquired inventors with high ingroup collaborative strength. We construct a sample of 3,625 acquired inventors implementing the coarsened exact matching technique and empirically test our arguments...

M&A and innovation: the role of relatedness between target and acquirer

The number and value of mergers and acquisitions1 (MA Capron, 1999; Hagedoorn and Duysters, 2000; Hall, 1990; Hitt et al., 1991). The results are often conflicting and fail to find any robust evidence (for an exhaustive survey, see Veugelers, 2006). These mixed findings are mainly due to the fact that the total effect of an M&A on different measures of innovation – inputs, outputs, and performance – can increase or decrease depending on the forces that dominate the M&A. Therefore, it is very important to identify specific characteristics of an M&A in order to analyze its relationship with the post-deal innovation activity of the merging firm. Furthermore, while initial conditions matter for the innovation outcome of the M&A, we also argue that the management response during the postacquisition integration will affect the final outcome of the M&A.