Technology-focused Acquisitions

6Conclusion, contributions, and outlook

This thesis set out to fulfill three research objectives, i.e., to find and study empirical evidence for performance- and functionality-focused acquisitions, build theory on acquisition decisions in relation to both types of acquisitions and test hypotheses to enable a generalization of findings.

To accomplish these tasks, a theoretical foundation for the framework of performance- and functionality-focused acquisitions was developed, hypotheses were formulated, a qualitative study was conducted to understand the mechanisms driving acquisition decision making within this framework, and finally hypotheses were tested quantitatively. These efforts produced a variety of notable results. First, the concept of ...