Overenforcement of antitrust laws, especially when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, misses how corporate research & development (R&D) unleashes innovation. When regulators challenge acquisitions, they risk slowing that pipeline.

R&D Requires Scale and Integration to Deliver Real Innovation

Breakthrough research is rarely a standalone product. It must be paired with complementary capabilities, from manufacturing and testing infrastructure to systems integration and operational deployment. Only companies that manage with a certain amount of scale can become this layer in the innovation ecosystem.

— Zoox illustrates this dynamic in autonomous vehicles. Zoox, acquired by Amazon in 2020, exemplifies how acquisition enables R&D that would otherwise stall. Amazon’s investment provided Zoox access to AWS computing resources, logistics expertise, and the capital runway necessary to continue developing purpose-built autonomous vehicles; a category of R&D too capital-intensive for most standalone startups to sustain. This is what allowed these companies to create, run, and scale robotaxis. These companies wouldn’t exist without these foundational investments, just like trains couldn’t exist before steam engines.

These cases show that innovation isn’t just about novel ideas; it’s about structural pathways to scale. 

M&A Has Been One of the Most Important Pathways for Scaling R&D

Strategic acquisitions often bring together the missing pieces that turn research into products faster and more efficiently than isolated development can.

— Nvidia’s acquisition of Mellanox Technologies married the latter’s high-performance networking solutions with Nvidia’s AI computing platforms, enabling end-to-end data center architectures tuned for AI and high-performance computing. Combining these technologies has materially improved data throughput, reduced latency, and strengthened R&D on next-generation AI infrastructure by integrating networking and compute layers rather than leaving them siloed. 

— Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub helped accelerate R&D into AI-assisted software development tools that benefit developers and the broader software ecosystem. Since GitHub joined Microsoft, GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant built on both GitHub’s platform data and Microsoft’s AI research, has been adopted by about 20 million developers worldwide, including 90% of Fortune 100 companies.

— This usage growth shows value to both users of the tool and consumers as a whole; developers and organizations are using Copilot to speed coding, reduce routine tasks, and ship products more quickly than before. This wouldn’t have been possible without Microsoft and GitHub coming together. 

These deals show how acquisitions can do more than change ownership. They integrate technologies and teams in ways that strengthen R&D and accelerate the development of new capabilities that neither company could have advanced as fast on its own.

Overenforcement of Antitrust Laws Undermines Innovation Engines

Overenforcement of antitrust laws often treats integration as inherently harmful, overlooking how scale and integration drive innovation. When firms cannot count on a path to scale, incentives for long-term, high-risk R&D weaken, slowing technological and economic progress. 

— Research from CCIA found that a more aggressive antitrust posture during the 2021–2024 period correlated with reduced acquisition activity and weaker venture capital outcomes for startups; findings consistent with academic research on how merger enforcement affects exit opportunities and early-stage investment incentives.

Many major breakthroughs, including autonomous vehicles and AI, depend on connecting deep R&D to markets through integration and partnerships. An antitrust approach that ignores these dynamics risks undermining innovation and shortchanging consumers, rather than promoting healthy, competition-driven growth.

The Takeaway

Antitrust enforcement serves essential purposes: protecting consumers, preserving competitive markets, and preventing abuses of market power. The concern is not with enforcement itself, but with an approach that treats scale and integration as presumptively harmful without weighing their demonstrated role in enabling innovation and bringing R&D to market.

A more balanced approach would evaluate acquisitions based on their actual effects on innovation, competition, and consumer welfare, not on assumptions about firm size alone. Agencies should consider whether blocking a transaction would strand valuable R&D or eliminate pathways that startups rely on to bring their innovations to market.