Brown Bag Seminar Industrial Economics

The acquisitions of startups by Google, Amazon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have steadily increased over the past years and have become more diversified. The current discussion about strategic motives for such acquisitions is vivid – especially in light of present concerns about the market power of gatekeepers, faster technological advances and digitalization. The principal question remains whether incumbent acquisitions of start-ups foster, displace, or deter innovations and which type. We match European patent data to mergers and acquisitions data of Big Tech in Europe adopting a new, data-driven method to classify patent data into clusters on a probabilistic basis and match this to acquired mergers and acquisitions data of Big Tech in Europe. We discuss how the used classifications hint to innovative activity or not in terms of the direction of innovation and synergies from acquisitions and possible strategic motives of Big Tech acquisition that may affect competition.