Measuring Performance in Technology-driven M&As: Insights from a Literature Review

What is the academic community’s contribution to the understanding of merger and acquisition(M&A)performance to date?Although there exists already a vast amount of theoretical as well as empirical studies aiming at explaining, predicting or understanding post-acquisition performance,there seems to be a growing dissatisfaction among scholars with the fragmented findings that have emerged to date. A possible explanation is that M&A scholars have mainly dealt with explaining the variance in M&A performance and have generally overlooked that contradictory findings are due to different measures of performance.This state of affairs is even more marked in the realm of technology-acquisitions -acquisition performance and postacquisition innovative performance. Academics are therefore called upon to investigate what M&A scholars measure as post- acquisition performance in high-technology industries