Knowledge Transfer in International Acquisitions: A Retrospective

In this Retrospective, the authors summarise and discuss the findings of our 1999 JIBS paper “Knowledge transfer in international acquisitions”, and they 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. The authors discuss how the timing of this publication, as an early contribution to the knowledge-based perspective on the firm, helped its visibility; and they consider the boundary conditions around our findings.