After successfully defending my research proposal titled ’The influence of temporality on exogenous growth strategies – Alternative business models in digital ecosystems’ in October 2021 I have been putting my focus on the first chapter of my dissertation.
Since then, under the title ’Dancing to the Rhythm: the Dynamics of Acquisition Motive on Acquisition Programmes’, I have been working on my first paper with Dr. Rick Aalbers (Radboud University) and Dr. Killian J. McCarthy (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), both from the Centre for Strategic Organizational Restructuring. After 5 months of theoretical build-up, data gathering, learning to work with the statistical software R to crunch numbers, and crunching said numbers I thus was more than happy to present our paper under the umbrella of the strategy underlying corporate development. Zooming in one specific aspect of corporate development, we investigate firms’ acquisitive behaviour, a mean to pair firms of selected high-tech industries with not only incumbent players but also fintechs.
Acquisitions keep being a major governance mode for high-tech organizations despite being both risky (measured by the high rate of failure) as well as resource-consuming over longer periods. However, if successful this strategic activity is a bedrock to evolve the firm’s portfolio or even business model while shaking up digital ecosystems. Therefore, the effect on repetitive acquirers’ financial performance ensures survivability in their fast-paced industries. As our paper unravels the underlying dynamics of serial acquisition programmes it provides a crucial new perspective for strategic management scholarship’s understanding.
Given this thematic embeddedness, it was more than fitting to invite the Strategy Department of the Nijmegen School of Management as well as the Hotspot Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Business Ecosystems of Radboud University as the audience to premiere our work. Jointly, we deep-dived into the paper, investigating the theoretical framework, the concepts, and their interrelated mechanisms as well as their methodological operationalization for the analysis. Finishing up with our results, our work was discussed with a positive prospect as well as focused feedback making the session both a pleasure as well as a helpful perspective on how to further flesh out our piece. We thank all participants who made this lively session a fruitful next step in our development.
– Jonas Geisen, ESR
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