CentER

Anna Nadolska

Abstract:
In an era of rapid technological progress and major political and economic transformations across the globe, the ability to acquire internationally becomes an important skill for internationalizing companies. Cross border mergers and acquisitions are growing rapidly in importance precisely because they provide firms with the fastest way of acquiring tangible and intangible assets in different countries. However, due to problems with coordinating and reconfiguring resources in an internationally dispersed network, transferring best practices across units, retaining key personnel and exchanging knowledge across geographically dispersed units, a lot of international acquisitions fail or underperform. While it is now accepted that learning from acquisition experience is one of the key ways of building successful routines for making acquisitions our understanding of what experiences could be useful for acquiring companies and in what way internationalizing companies learn to benefit from them is limited. The three studies presented in this thesis contributed to prior literature on by explicitly addressing those issues. We proposed that in order to understand how organisations learn from their experiences it is not only important to consider the performance of their acquisitions but also the amount of acquisitions that companies can absorb to build workable and usable routines over time.

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