Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: The JIBS Decade Award: Integrating international acquisitions

Abstract

THE 2009 JIBS DECADE AWARDThe first issue of JIBS each year begins with a reprint of the articlethat won the previous year’s JIBS Decade Award, followed bya Retrospective written by the author or authors, and one ormore invited Commentaries. The 2009 award-winning article is‘‘Knowledge transfer in international acquisitions’’ by HenrikBresman, Julian Birkinshaw and Robert Nobel, published in 1999(JIBS 30.3).The JIBS Decade Award recognizes the most influential articlepublished in the volume 10 years ago. The 2009 SelectionCommittee members were Stephen Tallman (chair), TorbenPedersen (2009 AIB Program Chair), John Cantwell (2008 AIBProgram Chair) and the JIBS Editor-in-Chiefasanexofficiomember. The award is presented by Palgrave Macmillan duringa special session honoring the authors at the annual meetingof the Academy of International Business (AIB). The 2009 AIBsession in San Diego was chaired by theJIBS Editor-in-Chief;JulianBirkinshawspokeonbehalfoftheauthors,andAlainVerbeke and Udo Zander provided commentaries.After the conference, the presentations were revised, sent out forsingle blind review to selected JIBS Area and Consulting Editors,and also circulated among the authors to encourage cross-fertilizing of ideas. The end product, I believe, is a wonderful setof papers that should – and will – be read together, and I suspectoften assigned as a set for PhD seminars. I thank all the Area andConsulting Editors who read these manuscripts and provided suchthoughtful comments for the authors.The first paper in this issue of JIBS is a reprint of the DecadeAward winning article by Bresman, Birkinshaw and Nobel. Thearticle is a qualitative study of the post-acquisition integrationprocess in three international acquisitions by Swedish multi-nationals. The authors argue that successful acquisitions createa social community where two-way knowledge sharing occursbetween the acquirer and acquired firms.The reprinted article is followed by ‘‘Knowledge transfer ininternational acquisitions: A retrospective’’ by Birkinshaw, Bresmanand Nobel. The Retrospective explores the origins of their award-winning article, situating it in the knowledge-based view of themultinational enterprise (MNE) (Kogut & Zander, 1993). They arguethat their paper makes three contributions to the internationalbusiness (IB) literature: mapping out the territory, comparing the