The Scaling of a Marketplace Unicorn: Sensing, Seizing, and Transforming Acquisition Opportunities
研究独角兽企业收购的关键动机，运用动态能力框架解释创始人如何通过感知、把握和转化收购来实现规模化，对研究平台市场和企业成长的学者有参考价值。
Once considered rare, unicorn start-ups are now a global phenomenon. This article identifies the key motives for acquisition in unicorns and extends David Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework (CMR, Winter issue 2026) to demonstrate how founders sense, seize, and transform acquisitions to successfully scale in a winner-takes-all platform market. In this context, acquisitions serve a three-pronged purpose: one, to achieve market dominance by growing market share, by diversifying into new markets, and by matching, mitigating, or eliminating rivals; two, to access strategic resources; and three, to resolve complex, idiosyncratic, and temporal trigger points in the scaling process. In terms of organizational scaling, external stakeholders, including rival firms, business partners, and particularly investors, are essential to developing the dynamic capabilities of sensing and seizing acquisitions that drive market expansion. However, it is the founding team that is crucial to transforming the resources acquired through acquisitions to resolve trigger points. They do this by reconfiguring and recombining resources, particularly technology and know-how, and by empowering entrepreneurial teams to create unicorns with unicorns, facilitating autonomous, innovation-driven growth.