This article discusses how firms innovate within and across firm boundaries by reconfiguring their resources and business units over time. Focusing on acquisitions and internal development as key aspects of business dynamics, the authors track the evolution of 87 product lines and 88 business...

This paper empirically examines how business unit reorganization affects innovation, and explores how the learning process may mediate this relationship. Unit reorganization is the creation, deletion, or recombination of business units within a firm. Innovation is radical and involves product...

This paper examines how structural recombination of business units within a firm impacts subsequent firm innovation. We argue that structural recombination is both a means for firms to unlock the potential for intraorganizational knowledge recombination and a source of disruption to the firm's...

Studying acquisitions in the US pharmaceutical industry, we first question how the alignment of acquirers’ innovation trajectories (as path-dependent or path-breaking change through the acquisition of targets with similar or distant innovations) with their own inventors’ pre-acquisition...

Companies face an expanding set of choices about where to locate their innovation activity, both within their home countries and abroad. This location choice also requires firms to make a simultaneous choice about the organizational structure of innovation activity: almost by definition,...