Integration and technology innovation in technology-sourcing M&As—A comparative study on overseas and domestic M&As of Chinese enterprises

ABSTRACT Technology-sourcing mergers and acquisitions (M&As) has become an important instrument for enterprises to acquire new knowledge and build technological ability. To achieve technology innovation improvement, the choice of integration strategy is vitally important. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between integration and innovation in technology-sourcing M&As. To verify our hypotheses, we conduct a comparative empirical study based on the data of overseas and domestic M&As of Chinese enterprises from 2000 to 2019. We find that for overseas M&As, the influence of integration degree on technology innovation depends on the resource characteristics of the two merging parties. In cases of high resource similarity and low resource complementarity, the degree of integration positively affects technology innovation, while in cases of low resource similarity and high resource complementarity, the degree of integration negatively affects technology innovation. In comparison, for domestic M&As, the degree of integration positively affects technology innovation.