Development of new online collaborative technologies provides businesses with new opportunities to interact with customers and get them involved more actively in product or service development processes. Different types of online communities provide access to global customers: their ideas and opinions. This chapter presents a review of three types of online communities which might be valuable for businesses, namely marketing activities and new product development. Online communities can assist companies in benefitting from the “wisdom of crowds”, creating customer-oriented image, boosting product portfolio with new ideas and handling negative online publicity. While some types of communities are more effective for solving sharply defined tasks, others can help with creative views due to members’ ability to think “outside of the box”.

Purpose: Companies engage in business relationships for a variety of reasons, including specialization, product development, and building competitive networks. Research has demonstrated that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) may challenge ongoing business relationships. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether and how competition authorities consider business relationships when evaluating M&As.

Methodology: The article uses the documentation from 450 M&As reported to the Swedish competition authority to capture the way in which an authority evaluates M&As. The Swedish competition authority evaluation corresponds to other national and international evaluation procedures.

Findings: The findings indicate that the competition authorities neglect an important aspect of business life, namely companies forming business relationships. The competition authorities evaluate M&As on the basis of risk for price increases, and consequently disregard such issues as heterogeneity in demand and offerings, and values built into existing business relationships.

Originality/Value/Contribution: The article contributes to research on business relationships through exploring how a public authority deals with such relationships. It also contributes to research on mergers and acquisitions through examining how these activities are evaluated by competition authorities. Furthermore, the article contributes to competition research by reflecting on competition law concerning M&A regulations in relation to business relationships.

The role of virtual communities in marketing development and brand management is gaining growing attention both from scholars and practitioners. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs[1]) often lack organizational readiness and pre-adoption awareness related to new tools available online. This article presents an in-depth case study on how a small company transforms itself into an interactive platform on the web from merely a provider of online information to help customers participate actively in bathroom design. Online design community hosted by the small bathroom supplier combines social network features and toolkits for 3D bathroom design, attracting both hobbyists and professionals. The study shows that the company benefits from the its move to interactivity with the community perceiving and providing a brand strengthening tool. However, the study also shows relative reluctance on the part of the company towards exploiting the full range of possibilities available online.

Mergers and acquisitions are frequent phenomena in everyday business activities (Holtström, 2008). For a merger or an acquisition, expected synergy is of fundamental importance. The synergy-concept emerged in the business strategy literature in the 1960s and has since then gained immense influence as a strategic tool for CEOs and company boards. In both theory and practice, synergy describes value creation of some kind (Pernod Ricard, 2008; Arya, 2002; Rozemeijer, 2000; Tapper, 1999; Larsson & Finkelstein, 1999; SvD, 1998; Olsson, 1997; Chandler, 1992; Trautwein, 1990; Porter, 1987; Rydén, 1971; Ansoff, 1965). Having a business network structure perspective as point of departure, we assume that mergers and acquisitions will involve and integrate not only the acquirer or the acquired company but also connected companies such as customers and suppliers (Holtström, 2008; 2003; Öberg, 2008; 2004; Dahlin, 2007; Öberg & Holtström, 2006; Anderson, Havila & Salmi, 2000;  Havila & Salmi, 2000; Bengtsson, 1994).

Synergy as concept (cf. Goold & Campbell, 1998; Itami, 1987; Lubatkin, 1983; Ansoff, 1965) is in this paper further developed and extended to comprise also synergy in the integrating companies’ business network. The paper aims to develop a framework to describe synergy in business relationships with customers and suppliers. To achieve this we first need to analyse how synergy is realised within a company. The analysis is based on a case study of mergers and acquisitions among industrial companies having business in Sweden.

Our findings indicate that within a company synergy is the result of the interplay between creation of value, alignment between strategic prioritisations and functional performance. Thus the integrating companies are at the core. The application of synergy in the M&A-companies business network is to include also their business relationships with other actors. So in a second analysis, we show that synergy in business relationships can be seen as the result of how companies a) adapt to changes in the business network, b) how the changes affects interdependency among actors, c) to what extent there is a co-ordination of activities between actors, but most importantly d) how this is carried out over time.

The resulting framework on connected synergy, combines the perspectives on synergy described above with also the development over time. Within the M&A-companies, two forms of synergy appears; (i) planned in the early phases of integration and, (ii) emerging over time. In the M&A-companies’ business relationship synergy can appear as (iii) something planned by the integrating companies to purposely influence other actors and, (iv) developing when different actors adapt to these changes over time.