Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In the past 10 years, the phenomenon of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which has played an important role in companies’ growth and competitiveness, has constantly grown (Bresciani, 2012). In particular, researchers, managers and bankers have studied it thoroughly. M&A operations are the most important way to grow a company’s capacity to create value (Bower, 2001; Cartwright and Schoenberg, 2006), with the aim of finding the optimal size to compete in the most important markets for the firm, where the maturity of the industry makes competition harder. The “time factor” and the difficulty of obtaining “market share” are the most important causes of M&A, which are usually preferred to internal development (Conca, 2010).
Economic, financial and legal factors have also influenced the spread of M&As, generating the so-called “waves” (DePamphilis, 2010). Nowadays, M&As are not extraordinary events but are real strategic options for companies in their development paths (Tardivo et al., 2012; Brealey et al., 2015). However, M&A activities have a high failure risk, and in some cases, the returns on the investment are lower than the price paid to acquire the firm (Conca, 2010; Brooks et al., 2015).
In the current state of the global market, where hyper-competitiveness is the main characteristic that companies have to face, competitive advantages and the ability to apply innovation in products and services play a key role in obtaining higher earnings and future survival (Maggioni and Del Giudice, 2011; Bresciani et al., 2016; Ferraris et al., 2017a). Innovation is the practical application of an invention or a discovery to a process, product or service that ensures better results for the company, having a good impact on its competitiveness and long-term success (Santoro et al., 2016). In particular, among all the strategic innovation development options, both internal and external to the firm’s boundaries, M&A are often the most effective response to the need to integrate innovative elements quickly into a business model, particularly in a dynamic context such as the current one (Dallocchio et al., 2016).
In this regard, in recent decades an emerging field of research has pointed the attention on the concept of open innovation:
Is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well...