Chapter 8 Small Firm Expectations from Acquisition in the ICT Industry: A Conceptual Framework for Stakeholder Analysis

The buyers' perspective of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) has been heavily researched, yet it has produced surprisingly few prescriptive findings. Given the limited amount of prior research from the sellers' perspective, inductive methods appear to be the most appropriate to research this phenomenon ( Eisenhardt, 1989 ; Yin, 2003 ; Miles & Huberman, 1994 ). Using the model outlined by Carlile and Christensen (2005) , the overall goal of the project reported here is to build a theoretical framework based on empirical observations. This will eventually facilitate the examination of this phenomenon and enhance knowledge as well as theory building for further research.