In the past 10 years, the phenomenon of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which has played an important role in companies’ growth and competitiveness, has constantly grown Mergers and acquisitions and innovation Received 14 July 2017 Revised 14 November 2017 26 January 2018 Accepted 5 February 2018 Management Research Review © Emerald Publishing Limited 2040-8269 DOI 10.1108/MRR-07-2017-0213 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2040-8269.htm Downloaded by Queen Mary University of London At 22:17 20 March 2018 (PT) (Bresciani, 2012). In particular, researchers, managers and bankers have studied it thoroughly. M&A operations are the most important way to grow a company’s capacity to create value (Bower, 2001; Cartwright and Schoenberg, 2006), with the aim of finding the optimal size to compete in the most important markets for the firm, where the maturity of the industry makes competition harder. The “time factor” and the difficulty of obtaining “market share” are the most important causes of M&A, which are usually preferred to internal development (Conca, 2010). Economic, financial and legal factors have also influenced the spread of M&As, generating the so-called “waves” (DePamphilis, 2010). Nowadays, M&As are not extraordinary events but are real strategic options for companies in their development paths (Tardivo et al., 2012; Brealey et al., 2015). However, M&A activities have a high failure risk, and in some cases, the returns on the investment are lower than the price paid to acquire the firm (Conca, 2010; Brooks et al., 2015). In the current state of the global market, where hyper-competitiveness is the main characteristic that companies have to face, competitive advantages and the ability to apply innovation in products and services play a key role in obtaining higher earnings and future survival (Maggioni and Del Giudice, 2011; Bresciani et al., 2016; Ferraris et al., 2017a). Innovation is the practical application of an invention or a discovery to a process, product or service that ensures better results for the company, having a good impact on its competitiveness and long-term success (Santoro et al., 2016). In particular, among all the strategic innovation development options, both internal and external to the firm’s boundaries, M&A are often the most effective response to the need to integrate innovative elements quickly into a business model, particularly in a dynamic context such as the current one (Dallocchio et al., 2016). In this regard, in recent decades an emerging field of research has pointed the attention on the concept of open innovation: Is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology. Open Innovation combines internal and external ideas into architectures and systems whose requirements are defined by a business model (Chesbrough, 2003).