Managing the Acquisition Process : Does an Integration Capability Exist?

Acquisitions are an effective tool to implement deliberate corporate strategy or the unique occasion to shift towards an emergent one. They can either allow a firm, to adjust its products-markets portfolio, at a speed not achievable through internal development, either provide the ability to gain all the benefits from pooling assets and sharing capabilities, in a way not obtainable through partnerships. From an organisational perspective, acquisitions can either bring into a company those capabilities the organization could not develop internally, either leverage existing capabilities into much more significant situations.Despite these considerations and the huge number of transactions carried out so far, the debate on acquisitions performance is still lively in the academic literature. The cumulative evidence on the economic impact of acquisitions shows that acquirers' abnormal returns are not distinguishable from zero, but notwithstanding the aggregate performance of acquisition activity, it is essential for strategy scholars, as well as practitioners, to understand why some firms perform better than others in managing acquisitions. In order to tackle this question, several classes of explanations, rooted in different research streams, have been advanced.This paper suggests that some of the acquiring firms, and in particular those firms who can be acknowledged as frequent acquirers, could achieve better than average performances in their acquisitions as a result of a superior capacity to learn from previous experience, transferring knowledge inside their organizations