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M&A success and synergies are regularly discussed in the practical literature, but synergies are typically treated as a static concept (how do you get them?) with little discussion of financial bet acquirers create in paying an up-front premium. We describe the importance of investor reactions, the nature of the challenge, and discuss synergies as a process with five rules of the road covering M&A strategy, diligence, culture, leakage, and validation and reporting. Potential acquirers must be better prepared before they commit these major capital investments, involving multiple stakeholders throughout the process of creating the value they are promising with M&A.

We report the important results of our 24-year study on acquirer performance, the persistence of investor reactions, and the role of the acquisition premium to support our position that synergies must be trackable and defendable before and after deal announcement. From our collective author experience of advising on many hundreds of synergy programs over the years, we distilled our experience based on the common lack of understanding of what is required by executives, and when, and what we have seen greatly improve the odds of success in achieving sufficient M&A synergies.

Major findings include: 1. Initial market reactions are good predictors of the future, most deals persist, positive or negative, and there is a big spread of returns between winners and losers with losers paying the highest premiums; 2. Premiums additions to target’s growth value and may require larger performance increases than acquirers expect; 3. Synergies are a dynamic process involving multiple stakeholders from becoming a prepared acquirer in M&A strategy, building an early synergy roadmap during diligence, understanding that culture and change issues launch at announcement and preparation must begin long before, anticipating leakage, and validating and reporting post-close.

Our study is original covering three waves of mergers over 24 years; we formalize the synergy challenge created by paying a premium with respect to the already existing growth expectations for the target; we make clear that ultimately validating synergies begins with M&A strategy and diligence through to the workings of an Integration Management Office, anticipating synergy leakage, and preparing employees for change.

The purpose of this article is to understand synergies in merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions.

Provides excerpts from the forthcoming book Synergies: The Art and Science of Making 2+2=5 by Bill Pursche.

The six most common mistakes that acquiring executives make are: defining synergies too narrowly or broadly; missing the window of opportunity; incorrect or insufficient use of incentives; not having the right people involved in synergy capture; mismatch between culture and systems; and using the wrong process.

This paper is a new approach to capturing the value of synergies in M&A, aimed at executives throughout the M&A process.

As an extension to Assael’s (2011) review on media synergy, this chapter examines the latest evolvement of media synergy research in the past 10 years by integrating studies from a wide range of leading journals.

We searched a total of 17 major journals in advertising, communication, and marketing from 2005 to 2014 and identified a total of 42 articles on media synergy. These studies were reviewed to assess the current status of media synergy research.

Studies of inter-media interaction at the individual level provide mixed support for a media synergistic effect, and the occurrence of this effect demands certain boundary conditions. Research on multi-media engagement has been gaining momentum in the past few years and is a promising subject in media synergy research.

We envision two growing approaches in future media synergy research: the neuroscientific approach and the data mining approach.

This chapter posits that media synergy research has evolved in the most recent years to a new phase, which is multi-media engagement. Hence, this chapter extends Assael’s work in terms of explicating media synergy in the context of social media engagement and identifying research gaps in current literature.

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are now the fundamental mechanisms of globalization and considered as prime vehicles for business engagement across the countries through the foreign direct investment route. Significant amounts of foreign funds are crossing the country borders for acquisitions with the objectives of earning super normal returns. But realizing super normal returns from foreign acquisitions are far more difficult than that of foreign greenfield projects or domestic M&As or greenfield projects. The super normal profit itself is “synergy” which is the main driving force for any M&A including the cross-border one. Even though foreign policies of individual countries affect cross-border M&A decisions, corporate and market-driven financial numbers significantly influence the synergy estimation. Synergy should bring in all round greater efficiency and value addition to all stakeholders. But if the cross-border deal is not financially crafted properly, it may fall flat causing more distress to the acquirer compared to domestic acquisition. The theory of synergy is well developed which mostly applies to the domestic M&As. But due to inherent differences between cross-border and domestic M&As, the same synergy theory may not apply equally to the cross-border ones. Therefore, a different connotation of synergy is propounded in this work for cross-border M&As, which can be a corollary to the conventional theory of synergy. This alternative theory of synergy aims at helping the companies in developing their own financial strategies before making their strategic decisions for cross-border M&A deals.

We contribute to the growing literature examining how social enterprises might best accommodate their hybrid structure when pursuing dual goals of social improvement and economic sustainability. Drawing on extant literature, the case is made for why synergy between the social and commercial business models that hybrid social enterprises employ should positively impact effectiveness in delivering organization outcomes. We then develop a method for comparing the synergy between the social and commercial business models employed within and across organizations, and test the method using a sample of seven social enterprises operating in different social fields. Results demonstrate that our method can be applied consistently across a range of social enterprise types and that variation in degree of synergy is considerable with overlap rates ranging from 9% to 77%. Using learning from this exploratory study, we develop propositions describing how and why social entrepreneurs develop business model synergy, the relationship between business model synergy and organizational performance, and suggest future research to test these propositions. Implications for theory development and practice are discussed.

Selecting and scheduling optimal project portfolio simultaneously is a complex decision-making problem faced by organizations to realize the strategy. However, dynamic synergy relationships among projects complicate this problem. This study aims at constructing a project portfolio selection and scheduling (PPSS) model while quantifying the dynamic synergetic effects to provide decision support for managing PPSS problems.

This study develops a mathematical model for PPSS with the objective of maximal project portfolio benefits (PPBs). To make the results align with the strategy, comprehensive PPBs are divided into financial and non-financial aspects based on the balanced scorecard. Then, synergy benefits evolve dynamically in the time horizon, and system dynamics is employed to quantify them. Lastly, a case example is conducted to verify the applicability of the proposed model.

The proposed model is an applicable model for PPSS while incorporating dynamic synergy. It can help project managers obtain the results that which project should be selected and when it should start while achieving optimal PPBs.

This study complements prior PPSS research in two aspects. First, financial and non-financial PPBs are designed as new criteria for PPSS, making the results follow the strategy. Second, this study illuminates the dynamic characteristic of synergy and quantifies the synergetic effect. The proposed model provides insights into managing a PPSS effectively.

This study aims to identify which elements of the vending marketing mix are the main sources of competitive advantage for the industry, how they impact vending profitability, and what are their related synergistic effects.

A full factorial experiment was developed to determine the effect of eight marketing mix scenarios on the profitability of a new vending channel in a French university library and assess the synergistic effects among three elements of a marketing mix (i.e. product quality, payment system, internal location) identified in a focus group as new sources of industry competitive advantage.

Although the main effects of product quality and payment system were weak-to-modest and insignificant, their interaction effect significantly impacted the daily net profit of the vending channel and generated the highest net synergy. The results partially challenge the marketing synergy axiom as internal location separately had a stronger impact on profitability than product quality and higher-order interaction effects do not necessarily translate into higher synergistic effects.

This research was conducted in a real-life setting and has its limitations, which future researchers can overcome by extending the temporal, geographic and product scope of the study.

The distinction that we introduced between gross and net synergy allowed us to partially challenge the prevailing marketing mix assumption that synergy is always positive (i.e. that a vending retailer can achieve synergy by selecting a combination of marketing mix elements instead of relying on them separately). Moreover, by demonstrating that marketing synergy is not a uni- but a bi-dimensional concept, we provide vending retailers with a better methodological understanding of why they may have already fallen into the synergy trap and how to avoid it in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model considering synergy effect for prefabricated construction service combination selection.

This research defines prefabricated construction service as a service-led construction method that meets the specific requirements of clients. Based on network theory, the multi-dimensional collaborative relationships of the prefabricated construction inter-services are formulated. The synergy effect is quantitatively calculated through the linear weighting of the strengths of collaborative relationships. Further, a weighted synergy network (WSN) is developed, from which a service composition selection model considering the synergy effect is established. Then, a genetic algorithm is employed to implement the model.

The results showed that (1) when the number of prefabricated construction services is increased, the synergy effect of combination options is enhanced; (2) The finer-grained prefabricated construction services, the stronger the synergy effect of service combination; (3) Clients have heterogeneous preferences for collaborative relationships, and there are differences in the synergy effect of service combination.

The contribution of this research includes proposed a method to quantify the synergy effect from the perspective of collaborative relationships, explored the specific procedure for the prefabricated construction service combination selection under the service-led construction, and provided a reference for promoting the development in construction. Besides, the model proposed could be applied to prefabricated construction service composition selection with diverse research boundaries or client preferences by executing the same procedure.

While previous operations management literature acknowledges the positive influence of Lean and Industry (I4.0) on performance, recent studies examining the synergy between these two factors have produced inconsistent and contradictory results. Therefore, this study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the effect of Lean and I4.0 synergy on firm performance.

This study utilised a meta-analysis approach, examining 23 empirical studies exploring multiple effects of the Lean and I4.0 synergy on firm performance. Multiple subgroup analyses were conducted to assess the contradictory outcomes and identify in what conditions such synergy may achieve performance.

The results affirm the prevailing positivist perspective among most scholars regarding the positive influence of the Lean and I4.0 synergy on firm performance. However, the overall effect size derived from the studies indicates a weak relationship, suggesting that this synergy alone is not the sole determinant factor of firm performance. In addition, the subgroup analyses reveal the presence of contingent conditions that may affect the performance outcomes when integrating Lean and I4.0, as most effects exhibit a weak relationship.

This study represents the first meta-analysis investigating the relationship between the Lean and I4.0 synergy on firm performance. By shedding light on the contradictory effects often depicted in the operations management literature, this study provides a critical reflection for researchers who tend to adopt an overly optimistic view of such synergy.

A substantial minority of bidding firms disclose synergy forecasts during mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Using these hand‐collected synergy announcements, the purpose of this paper is to investigate synergy characteristics as well as explore their shareholder wealth effects within the European energy sector between 1998 and 2010.

The authors employ the market model event study methodology to infer short‐term wealth implications as well as the Fama French 3 Factor model to estimate long‐term effects.

The paper provides evidence for a positive correlation between the synergy size and combined bidder and target returns. However, the market discounts disclosed synergies to a degree which reveals that managers in the energy sector are likely to overestimate the actual, realizable size of the emerging synergies. Additionally, the results show that post merger long‐term returns of synergy disclosing firms remain significantly positive, indicating that projected synergies are continuously realized.

As the first study the paper shows that a synergy disclosure effect exists within the European market and hence demonstrates that synergy forecasts serve as an efficient instrument to decrease existing information asymmetries.