This paper investigates whether acquisitions involving public high technology firms are best understood in terms of acquirers taking over firms with ‘superior' innovation performance to access their assets, or acquiring firms with ‘inferior' innovation performance to turn them around....

Drawing on organisational, managerial and financial theories, we explore whether acquirers become more innovative and the factors that can enhance their absorptive and financial capacity to benefit from acquisition. Over a three year post-acquisition window, our sample of 2624 high technology US...

We investigate the prevalence of the motive to source technological knowledge externally through corporate acquisition. Drawing on make-or-buy and organizational learning theories, we infer the implications of this explanation for the acquirers’ pre-acquisition innovative characteristics....