PAPSTPMA.MS1 Exploring the potential transition from strategic technology partnering to mergers and acquisitions

Brabant, Aarhus and Copenhagen Business Schools for their comments on a previous draft. Exploring the potential transition from strategic technology partnering to mergers and acquisitions This paper studies a number of research topics derived from the basic question: do inter-firm partnerships with different intermediary modes of company organization change over time as companies that were previously cooperating become integrated? The analysis is limited to the group of strategic technology alliances, i.e. those inter-firm agreements for which joint technology development or technology sharing is part of the agreement. The paper first explores the literature that refers to the possible transition from strategic technology alliances to mergers and acquisitions. Based on this we formulate a number of hypotheses regarding the change in modes of governance and several dimensions of this process related to the size of firms, the international distribution, the distribution of contractual and equity agreements and the industry specificity. The major finding of our research is that the transformation from strategic technology alliance to merger and acquisition hardly ever takes place. This suggests that alliances and mergers and acquisitions are not part of a rather smooth continuum but they are first of all different modes of governance where one mode certainly does not lead to the other.