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...

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...