This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world’s largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: firstly, to emphasise the emerging...

The past twenty years have witnessed the emergence of internet conglomerates fueled by acquisitions. We provide a simple theoretical model to shed some light on this. Following a large literature in management (Wernerfelt, 1984) we endow firms with a set of scarce competencies which drive their...