In the era of globalization, Chinese firms increasingly leverage sequential cross-border mergers and acquisitions to navigate complex international environments. Understanding the sustained impact of this strategy requires a holistic view beyond isolated transactions. Adopting an open systems perspective, this study examines how sequential cross-border M&As influence the evolution of firms’ innovation boundaries as a dynamic system property. Combining grounded theory with textual analysis of Chinese M&A cases, this study develops an integrated systemic process framework and empirically tests it using data from Chinese listed firms (2002–2021) via fixed-effects models. Results reveal that sequential cross-border M&As act as external inputs that trigger internal system reconfiguration, significantly expanding innovation boundaries. This expansion process is mediated by dynamic capabilities, which constitute the firm’s core adaptive mechanism, and is moderated by resource slack that functions as critical system redundancy. These findings contribute to systems science by elucidating how firms, conceptualized as complex adaptive systems, transition from isolated deal-making to sustained capability building through iterative feedback loops in global competition.
Guo et al. (Sat,) studied this question.