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Danielle Cohn and Maya Baratz of Comcast discuss how the company identifies founding teams that are a good fit for potential partnership or acquisition.…Read More
In this project, I seek to compare how effectively family firms undertake and implement acquisitions and divestitures relative to their non-family counterparts. While family firms are less likely than non-family firms to undertake divestitures, the stock market returns earned by the family firms that undertake these deals exceed those of non-family firms.…Read More
The Mack Institute Spring Conference 2017 explored how firms can deploy externally facing strategies for innovation success.…Read More
In this project, I plan to study the questions of how firms learn and why they fail to learn in the context of post-merger integration. Existing works on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) argue that M&A is an important source of innovation and growth for firms. …Read More
Entrepreneurial start-up ventures are a major contributor to innovation and job creation in the U.S. One critical task that entrepreneurs face is finding investors who are willing to provide the funding and resources that will allow the business to survive.…Read More
This research investigates capability development at the business unit level of analysis. To do so, we consider business units that have been serially bought and sold, or “repeatedly divested” units.…Read More
This research project investigates the role of consultants and their “rented capabilities” in the post-acquisition integration process. As a first objective, we aim to shed light on the role of intermediaries — specifically, consultants — in the growth-by-acquisition process.…Read More
This study explores acquisition strategy of the U.S. technology sector. I plan to build a comprehensive and detailed dataset of acquisitions of US and foreign startups by US technology companies.…Read More
This paper explores the phenomenon of “acqui-hires”, defined as acquisitions of early-stage startups made purely to acquire talent. Acqui-hires are prevalent among Northern California’s high-technology companies, who use these to fill gaps in their strategic roadmaps. Taking the perspective of an acquirer, we examine the different ways acquirers approach acquir-hires relative to conventional acquisitions.…Read More
Acquisitions are an attractive means of exploration (sourcing innovation and new technologies externally) as well as exploitation (capturing economic value from existing resources through economies of scale); they shape the capabilities of firms and critically impact the longevity of firms and their competitive advantage.…Read More
This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods, with particular emphasis on network data of worker behavior, to analyze changes in worker communication patterns during the first three years of a post-acquisition integration. The findings suggest that new communication routines develop slowly and are not entirely enduring even when a transformative event, such as an acquisition, occurs.…Read More
A novel survey dataset on computed tomography (CT) machine acquisition is used to explore which theories best answer two questions from the decision making literature. First, what determines how much uncertainty a firm has when investing in updated technology? Second, what determines the value of the acquisition? In answering these questions, two theoretical comparisons are conducted.…Read More
A prominent motive for corporate venture capital (CVC) is the identification of entrepreneurial-firm acquisition opportunities. Consistent with this view, we find that one of every five startups purchased by 61 top corporate investors from 1987 through 2003 is a venture portfolio company of its acquirer.…Read More
This dissertation studies firm strategy to gain technological knowledge from external sources in dynamic industries and the performance implications of these strategies. In dynamic industries, firms need to integrate new knowledge, and build new resources and capabilities to maintain competitive advantage.…Read More
