Ideas, Inventors, and Deals: The Innovation–M&A Nexus

Key Points

• Examine how mergers and acquisitions alter the creation, ownership, and diffusion of innovation across organizational boundaries.
• Synthesized interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical literature spanning corporate finance, industrial organization, strategic management, and sector studies.
• Evaluated alternative boundary mechanisms (licensing, corporate venture capital, acqui-hiring) and post-deal margins of innovation, including R&D effort, patenting, and talent retention.
• Showed that M&A deals represent selective matching where technological capabilities shape target acquisition, startup exits, and build-versus-buy boundaries.
• Identified heterogeneous post-deal impacts across multiple innovation margins, ranging from exploratory patent novelty and product commercialization to inventor mobility and team reorganization.