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BY AMY MULLER AND LIISA VALIKANGAS
Conclusion
he corporate boundaries that matter today are the boundaries that define and contain the corporation's innovation searches [5].
The two extended innovation strategies that we have discussed in this paper — recombinant exploitation in mature industries and explorative collaboration in emerging spaces — redefine the firm as a value-creating unit, emphasizing the importance of cross-company collaborations for longer-term viability.
Furthermore, the best chances for innovation derive from the negotiation between different sets of values, culture, or knowledge. To this point, we observe that many acquisitions turn sour as an acquiring company imposes its "DNA" on the acquired company, thus destroying much of the target company's value.
Anecdotally, a manager in a large U.S. corporation once remarked: "No
matter if the start-up is growing 20% a year. When we acquire the firm,
the growth rate unfailingly drops to 4% because that is the growth rate
we manage to."