Mergers and acquisitions in the public research sector. Toward a comprehensive typology

Abstract While the literature on firm mergers and acquisitions (M M&A involved nearly one-fifth of public-sector research organizations and were geographically distributed across two-fifths of all European regions. Demographic events concerned primarily specialist institutions and to a larger extent public research entities and colleges. While the strong involvement of colleges was expected from the literature, for the first time we can show the extensive restructuring which took place in the public research entity sector. On the contrary, well known and prestigious university mergers, largely driven by the quest for international visibility, constituted only 10% of the events. Finally, we identified six broad groups of events characterized in terms of two dimensions, i.e. whether the involved organizations are active on the same or different markets and the extent of overlap between subject offerings.