Mergers and acquisitions as enabler of digital business transformation: Introducing an integrated process

Abstract

Digitalization requires business development agents to align their business models to meet customer demands and competition requirements. To achieve this transformation however is a challenge for incumbent organizations, since over time they have often developed rigidity and they might suffer under lack of necessary competencies. Acquiring digital start-ups is an often used and promising strategy to close these feasibility gaps. However, digitalization and mergers and acquisitions have not yet been brought together in business sciences. Therefore, this paper aims on identifying process steps of both, digital business transformation and mergers and acquisition models and to relate these process steps for designing a new integrated process. Finally, the resulting process is described in terms of main tasks and their sequence. The paper concludes that future research should focus on integrating operative methods to provide further support for incumbents when facing digitalization.