Build, Borrow, or Buy

Preface

In many ways, this book started at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the fall of 1993. Separately, we were studying how firms sometimes survive and adjust within dynamic environments, particularly how firms use acquisitions, alliances, and other mechanisms to acquire and recombine strategic resources. Our first encounter and subsequent joint work led to two decades of close friendship between our families and to collaborative research and teaching on how firms compete and survive by developing sound resource-selection and resource-management strategies.

This book derives most directly from research we have done over the past decade—building on our earlier projects—into how firms “build, borrow, or buy” the resources they ...