Human Resources in Technological M&As: Target Firm Inventors' post- M&A Organizational Context

This paper investigates the impact of the target firm inventor’s post-M&A organizational characteristic on firms’ open innovation performance following technological M&As. Specifically, extending the previous literature which merely focused on how many of the target firm’s inventors were retained after the M&A, the paper suggests more detailed dimensions of target firm inventor retention, i.e., the target firm inventor network retention and the target firm inventor field retention. The study investigates how these factors affect the post-M&A innovation process in terms of knowledge preservation and synergy realization. Using logit transformed ordinary least square regression and negative binomial regression, 99 M&A deals of 73 firms in the biopharmaceutical industry from 2001 to 2009 were investigated. The key implications of this paper are that by changing the post-M&A organizational context of the target firm inventors, firms can better leverage their innovation performance and align it with the ultimate goal of the technological M&A.