基于二次创新理论的吉利跨国并购案例研究

当前后发企业的技术寻求型的跨国并购发展迅速，然而并后成功实现整合并获得技术升级的企业并不多见，一直以来是困扰后发跨国企业的一大难题。本研究在二次创新理论的基础上构建了全球化进程中的动态演化模型，试图通过组织学习与组织合法性两个维度，解释后发跨国企业如何在跨国并购过程中实现技术能力的积累与提升。通过追踪研究中国民营车企吉利集团十余年内多次跨国并购行为，我们发现：吉利集团凭借三次螺旋上升的互补资产寻求型跨国并购，利用组织内外部合法性的杠杆效应，确保了并购后组织学习的有效性，正是通过这种全球二次创新的动态演进模式，吉利集团成功实现了后发者的追赶。

A case study of Geely’s cross-border M&A based on the secondary innovation theory

Faced with the rapid development of global economy, diversified customer needs and rapid changes in technology, it is not enough for latecomer firms of developing countries to rely solely on technology introduction to improve their competitiveness and narrow their technological gap between leader firms of developed countries. Through cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) leader firms from develop countries to overcome industry entry barriers, conducting the globally secondary innovation has increasingly become the only way for latecomer firms to participate in international competition. However, integration road for latecomer firms is not smooth, because of the existence of difference in management manners, institutions and cultures. McKinsey statistics show that the rate of cross-border M&A failures of Chinese firms in the past 20 years is as high as 67%. For instance, Lenovo did not acquire key technologies after acquiring IBM’s PC business and Motorola, leading to its economic performance falls sharply. TCL acquisition of Germany Schneider and France Thomson has not achieved good integration, with a loss of 4 billion yuan in three years. SAIC acquisition of South Korea's Ssangyong lost more than 3 billion yuan after 5 years and was forced to file for bankruptcy protection. While a group of Chinese firms represented by Geely Group via successfully cross-border M&A integration achieve a win-win. How these latecomer firms break the failure curse of cross-border M&A is not only a new hot spot in existing literature, but also a difficult issue for firms’ managerial practice, and also a core issue of this research.The technological catch-up of latecomer firms is one of the important issues in the international business field. Mathews’ LLL (Linkage-Leverage-Learning) theory emphasizes that latecomer firms can accelerate their internationalization processes through organizational changes, and can obtain a dominant position in the international market through strategic changes, but it ignores the importance of technological change. Springboard perspective thinks that latecomer firms can gain the strategic resources needed for their own developments through the pre-set global strategic springboard, and can reduce the restrictions from home institution and home market, but these springboard activities have obvious revolving and recursive characteristics, making the overseas operations of latecomer firms difficultly. Compared with the LLL theory and the springboard perspective, although the existing technological catch-upliterature for latecomer firms, to the extent that can explain technological catch-up issues of latecomer firms, there are still two limitations. First, the extant technological catch-up literature is based on newly industrialized countries, whose business development paths are different from those in developing countries. Second, existing literature rarely involve the context for the cross-border M&A of latecomer firms.While the secondary innovation theory has more explanatory for the organizational learning models and technological catch-up of latecomer firms. Although previous studies based on home country context’s technology-introduction have been widely recognized, researches focused on the cross-border M&A of latecomer firms need to be further expanded. Technology-seeking cross-border M&A of latecomer firms develops rapidly, but it is rare for latecomer firms to successfully achieve integration and access the upgrading of technology. Therefore, this study based on thesecondary innovation theory builds the dynamic model of global secondary innovation, and employing the single case longitudinal research approach, deeply explores how does the latecomer firm under highly uncertain international institution environment utilize organizational learning to break through the extant technological paradigms and inherent experience and inertia further achieving the technological catch-up even surpassing catch-up. This study finds that Geely Group based on three complementary asset-seeking cross-border M&As, exploiting the leverage effect of internal and external organizational legitimacy to lever and ensure the efficiency of organizational learning, successfully achieves the technological catch-up and surpassing catch-up of the latecomer firm.