Hiring New Key Inventors to Improve Firms’ Post-M&A Inventive Output

Although merger and acquisitions (M&As) are acknowledged as an important means to access innovative assets and know-how, firms’ inventive output often declines in the post-M&A period. Financial, managerial and organizational constraints related to the M&A event contribute to inventive output declines and inventors’ departure. Prior literature treats the acquiring firm as a passive observer of invention declines. This study argues that acquiring firms can take measures by hiring new key inventors. We show that the hiring of new key inventors in the post-M&A period can counteract invention declines in two ways. First, these newly hired inventors are associated with an increase of corporate inventive output after the M&A. Second, they are also associated with an improved inventive output of inventors already working for the acquiring firm. These results suggest that an appropriate hiring policy can counteract declining inventive output of firms in the aftermath of M&As

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector during 2011 data taking

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector at the LHC during the 2011 data taking period is described. During 2011 the LHC provided proton–proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and heavy ion collisions with a 2.76 TeV per nucleon–nucleon collision energy. The ATLAS trigger is a three level system designed to reduce the rate of events from the 40 MHz nominal maximum bunch crossing rate to the approximate 400 Hz which can be written to offline storage. The ATLAS jet trigger is the primary means for the online selection of events containing jets. Events are accepted by the trigger if they contain one or more jets above some transverse energy threshold. During 2011 data taking the jet trigger was fully efficient for jets with transverse energy above 25 GeV for triggers seeded randomly at Level 1. For triggers which require a jet to be identified at each of the three trigger levels, full efficiency is reached for offline jets with transverse energy above 60 GeV. Jets reconstructed in the final trigger level and corresponding to offline jets with transverse energy greater than 60 GeV, are reconstructed with a resolution in transverse energy with respect to offline jets, of better than 4 % in the central region and better than 2.5 % in the forward direction

Comment: The Performance of Performance

As Bill Starbuck observes, measures of performance do not perform very well. They are compromised by measurement and data errors, which complicates statistical inferences. Nevertheless, performance measurements are needed and may be necessary for guiding organizational changes. Although the errors that Starbuck notes are important, there are other considerations that may be more damaging for most uses of performance data. Most users of performance measurements are interested in what they reveal about behaviors and capabilities. They use performance measures as signal of some underlying latent trait, such as leadership ability of competitive advantage. Seen from this perspective, performance measures are plagued by several other sources of error and bias in addition to those discussed by Starbuck

COMPETITIVE INTERFIRM DYNAMICS WITHIN AN INDUSTRIAL MARKET SYSTEM

Scholars concerned with economic processes in industrial economies have long been concerned with the dynamics of firms' adaptation to new circumstances. This article develops a conceptual framework within which industrial dynamics and competitive interfirm interactions can be analyzed in terms of adaptive responses to changes in the complex system of which the firms form part-rather than in terms of anomalies and exceptions, such as the ''market failures'' and ''externalities''favored in mainstream microeconomics. In order to do so, a conceptual framework is introduced, dubbed an Industrial Market System (IMS), in which firms play a central role as actors, and where their resources, routines and relations with each other generate complex structures such as networks, consortia, and development blocks which mediate and shape the strategic responses made by firms. dynamism of the ''new economy'' and the startup firms it generates. There have also been parallel developments such as the rising importance of corporate spinoffs (as counter-trend to mergers and acquisitions) whereby firms seek greater focus and entrepreneurial initiative through divesting parts of their operations as viable businesses.