Horizontal expansion through an increasing product portfolio lies at the core of modern endogenous growth literature. I document that diversified firms shift investment toward embedded intangibles (organizational capital, brand value) at the expense of transferable intangibles (patents, software). This strategic reallocation is accompanied by declining markups and productivity, and reduced innovation by rivals. In an extended endogenous-growth framework, embedded intangibles drive horizontal expansion but raise entry barriers and decrease social returns, ultimately sacrificing economy-wide growth for firm-level advantages.

Using Turkish administrative firm-to-firm transaction data, we study how acquisitions affect target firms and their production networks. We find that acquisitions increase intangible intensity but have no consistent effects on conventional performance measures. Network consequences depend on acquirer origin: domestic acquisitions strengthen existing relationships, while foreign acquisitions promote outsourcing and diversification. We attribute these differences to variation in firms’ relationship capability.

In this paper, I investigate how closely related and distant firm scope creates different consequences for innovation. I measure related scope using Hoberg and Phillips (2025) text-based product-market clusters and distant scope using the Compustat segment count. Using a panel of U.S. public firms over 1990–2019, I estimate local projections in response to innovation shocks and find that these two dimensions govern opposite regimes. Closely related scope generates synergy: firms tilt intangible investment toward more R&D, attract rival entry, and convert innovation into persistent productivity and markup gains. High distant scope generates friction: rents dissipate, productivity gains vanish, and intangible investment in R&D weakens after the innovation shock. The results show that innovation consequences emerge from the structure, not the level, of scope.

I build an endogenous growth model in which fundamental knowledge advances through the resolution of disagreement between competing scientific camps, settled science is then converted into commercialisable technology through a separate translation process, and firms gradually adopt and improve upon that technology through standard firm dynamics. Two distinct adaptation rates govern aggregate growth. The first is the rate at which competing scientific approaches reconcile into a settled paradigm. The second is the rate at which settled science is commercialised into technology that firms can use. I show that the two rates act as sequential bottlenecks, that scientific disagreement carries a synergy-versus-friction tradeoff which pins down an interior optimal degree of pluralism, and that the decentralised allocation of research effort is generically inefficient. The framework rationalises the long and variable lags between fundamental breakthroughs and their commercial impact, the canonical instance being the path from the reconciliation of matrix and wave mechanics in the late 1920s to semiconductors, lasers, and magnetic resonance imaging decades later.