Learning to expand internationally: The pace and success of foreign acquisitions

In an era of rapid technological progress and major political and economic transformations accross the globe, the ability to acquire internationally becomes an important skill for internationalizing companies. Cross border mergers and acquisitions are growing rapidly in importance precisely becuase they provide firms with the fastest way of acquiring tangible and intabgible assets in different countries. However due to problems with coordinating and reconfiguring resources in an internationally dispersed network, transferring best practices accross units, retaining key personnel and exchanging knowledge across geographically dispersed units, a lot of international acquisitions fail or underperform. While it is now accepted that learning from acquisition experience is one of the key ways of building successful routines for making acquisitions our understanding of what experiences could be useful for acquiring companies and in what way internationalizing companies learn to benefit from them is limited. The three studies presented in this thesis contributed to prior literature by explicitly addressing those issues. We proposed that in order to understand how organizations learn from their experiences it is not only importanrt to consider the performance of their acquisitions but also the amount of acquisitions that companies can absorb to build workable and usable routines over time.