Acqui-hiring and deep-tech ventures: Evidence from Sweden

Jing Xiao and Åsa Lindholm Dahlstrand

No 2024/11, Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research

Abstract: Recently, acqui-hiring, which refers to the acquisitions driven by gaining access to target human capital, has emerged as a proliferating phenomenon in acquisitions of small technology firms. However, we still know little about this phenomenon, particularly outside the community of Silicon Valley. This study sheds new light on the nature of acqui-hiring by focusing on what drives acqui-hiring. Using a sample of 213 technological acquisitions of Swedish technology firms, our results show that firms tend to be acqui-hired when they are younger and when they are based on the development of deep tech, a group of emerging disruptive technologies, of which the technological base involves high levels of technological newness and complexity. The results show a support to our initial idea that acqui-hiring could be driven by the acquiring firm’s need to acquire complex knowledge and/or new capabilities that are embodied in target key employees or engineering teams. In addition, we develop a typology and identify four types of acqui-hiring. We use case illustrations of deep-tech acqui-hiring to demonstrate four differentiated acquisition strategies, including technology strengthening, product expansion, product experimentation and technology experimentation.

Keywords: Acqui-hiring; deep tech; technological acquisitions; technological newness and complexity; combined methods; Sweden (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 L26 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2024-09-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-mac, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.circle.lu.se/upload/CIRCLE/workingpapers/202411_xiao.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2024_011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research, Lund University, PO Box 117, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Torben Schubert ().