Julian Birkinshaw, Henrik Bresman, Robert Nobel
In this Retrospective, we summarise and discuss the findings of our 1999 JIBS paper Knowledge transfer in international acquisitions, and we consider how research in this area has evolved over the last decade. The paper's key contribution was to show how the post-acquisition integration process in a sample of three international acquisitions led to the creation of a social community, characterised by two-way knowledge-sharing between the acquirer and acquired companies. We discuss how the timing of this publication, as an early contribution to the knowledge-based perspective on the firm, helped its visibility; and we consider the boundary conditions around our findings. © 2010 Academy of International Business.
London Business School, London NW1 4SA, Regents Park, United Kingdom; INSEAD, Singapore, Singapore; IFL, Stockholm, Sweden
