Measuring performance in technology-driven M&AS: Insights from a literature review

What is the academic community's contribution to the understanding of merger and acquisition (M&A) performance to date? Although there exists already a vast amount of theoretical as well as empirical studies aiming at explaining, predicting or understanding post-acquisition performance, there seems to be a growing dissatisfaction among scholars with the fragmented findings that have emerged to date. A possible explanation is that M&A scholars have mainly dealt with explaining the variance in M&A performance and have generally overlooked that contradictory findings are due to different measures of performance. This state of affairs is even more marked in the realm of technology-driven acquisitions, in that we find measures of both overall post-acquisition performance and post-acquisition innovative performance. Academics are therefore called upon to investigate what M&A scholars measure as post-acquisition performance in high-technology industries. This chapter points toward a better understanding of M&A performance construct in high-tech settings through a review of existing empirical research of technology-based M&As within a broad range of scholarly journals. Findings present a fragmented state of affairs with a proliferation of operational definitions of post acquisition performance and a wide array of indicators. Moreover, different perspectives and time lags are accounted for. Copyright © 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited.