Acquisitions and mergers of equals often fail to deliver shareholder value, largely because poor integration practices do not allow synergies to be created. The issue has been addressed by several studies from two different research streams: the first looks at the combination of resources after the acquisitions and the second focuses on the human factor. We propose an integrated model where the effects of these key aspects are tested simultaneously and where three independent variables are included: the extent of planning and knowledge from previous acquisitions and knowledge from previous relationships. We believe that through the model managers can prioritise their actions and select an appropriate time horizon for the integration.

Web-based intermediaries that offer crowdsourcing services represent a new and promising way through which firms can leverage the power of a crowd to sustain their innovation performance. However, limited attention has been devoted thus far to understanding the relationship between the intermediaries architecture, i.e., how they deliver their service, and the innovation problems they are designed to solve. Based on an empirical base of 7 in-depth case studies, two distinct architectures, namely competition and competence searching, will be described in the paper; it will be demonstrated that each type is designed to solve specific classes of innovation problems. The paper presents important implications both for firms and web-based intermediaries. On the one hand, firms should collaborate with the web-based intermediary which presents the architecture that best fits the innovation problem to be solved. On the other hand, web-based intermediaries should be designed in coherence with the problems at hand.

In the "knowledge economy" upheld by the European Lisbon strategy, knowledge-intensive services are considered a key driver for innovation and competitiveness. A category of knowledge-intensive services that has become of utmost importance in the last few decades is New Product Development (NPD) services, which interconnect distant knowledge domains with the client firms. In addition to NPD service providers, webbased innovation intermediaries have started to help innovative firms access dispersed bodies of knowledge. Despite the heterogeneity of their characteristics, however, a clear typology of the strategies used by traditional NPD service providers and web-based intermediaries to interact with their knowledge sources and with their clients is missing. This typology would be very useful for those firms that are willing to collaborate with innovation intermediaries because it could highlight the typologies of NPD problems different intermediaries are apt to address and the managerial challenges that working with them entails. Developing such a classification framework is the main goal of this paper. The typology proposed in this paper suggests that innovation intermediaries should be distinguished based on the following: (i) the way they Access their distributed knowledge sources and (ii) the way they Deliver value to their clients. By combining these two dimensions, 4 categories of innovation intermediaries are identified, which are named brokers, mediators, collectors and connectors. A multiple case study analysis involving 4 innovation intermediaries and 12 of their clients is presented in the paper. The analysis provides exploratory insights into (i) the typologies of NPD problems that each class of intermediaries addresses and (ii) the managerial challenges that working with each of them entails. These preliminary findings call for further theoretical and empirical research into the complex interaction among innovation intermediaries, their dispersed sources of knowledge and their clients.

Gelling colloidal suspensions represent an important class of soft materials. Their mechanical response is characterized by a solid-to-liquid transition at a given shear stress level. Moreover, they often exhibit a complex time-dependent rheological behavior known as thixotropy. The viscosity changes find their origin in the microstructure, which depends on flow history. Yet, the structural response of colloidal gels to flow differs fundamentally from most complex fluids, where flow induces orientation. Upon yielding, low to intermediate volume fraction gels break down in a spatially anisotropic way. Bonds in the velocity-velocity gradient plane are broken, whereas microstructural features in other planes are less affected. The subsequent flow-induced microstructural anisotropy is characterized by typical butterfly scattering patterns. However, as yet there was no evidence for the pertinence of this anisotropy for the rheological properties of these systems. In the present work, orthogonal superposition rheometry was first used to evaluate how the flow-induced microstructure affects the viscoelastic properties. It was shown to retain significant elasticity in the velocity-vorticity plane, even when the structure liquefied. Further, the shearinduced mechanical anisotropy was measured using two-dimensional small amplitude oscillatory shear, exploiting the fact that for suitable thixotropic samples the recovery after arresting the flow is relatively slow. It was hence possible to measure the anisotropy of the moduli upon cessation of flow. The mechanical anisotropy was shown to be spectacular, with the storage moduli in perpendicular directions differing by as much as 2 orders of magnitude. V C 2017 The Society of Rheology. [http://dx

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