When it comes to the impact of absorptive capacity on co-innovation, how really harmful is knowledge leakage?

Abstract

<jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title> <jats:p>This paper aims to analyze the moderating effect of knowledge leakage on the relationship between absorptive capacity and co-innovation, which implies collaborative work and knowledge exchange with external actors on virtual innovation platforms.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title> <jats:p>The research model was tested in a sample of companies through the use of structural equations by the partial least squares method.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title> <jats:p>The results confirm that absorptive capacity is a prior condition for co-innovation. However, the most interesting and surprising result has to do with knowledge leakage, which actually has a negative moderating effect, but whose size is modest, which dismisses the great damages that such leakage could generate.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title> <jats:p>This study is pioneering in analyzing knowledge leakage in the context of virtual innovation platforms, which occurs in a different manner as compared to leakage in the context of collaborative research and development, widely analyzed in the literature. However, the main contribution of the paper lies in the fact that the results evidence the existence of an intermediate position between the traditional approach that insists on demonstrating the devastating consequences of the leakage and the emerging approach that dismisses these negative repercussions and conceives leakage as a positive organizational phenomenon, natural and inherent to the interaction of the firm with the environment. The results also contradict recent empirical evidence that completely dismisses the negative repercussions of knowledge leakage in contexts where incremental innovations prevail.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Dispersed knowledge management in ecosystems

“…Eventually, the conversation on KM literature extended to encompass meso-level and macro-level aspects; for example, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) proposed the concept of absorptive capacity, which relies on a firm’s ability to acquire and use knowledge, as seen in Balle et al (2020) and Arias-Pérez et al (2020). A significant research stream explored the role of knowledge and the development of routines (Carayannis et al , 2017) and capabilities (Bingham et al , 2019; Eggers and Kaplan, 2013).…”

Exploring Factors Influencing Open Innovation Adoption in SMEs: The Evidence from Emerging Markets

“…Overby et al (2006) [30] establish absorptive capacity as a set of organisational processes and routines through which firms obtain, digest, transform and employ knowledge, to devise a dynamic organisational capability. Absorptive capacity is classified into four dimensions [31]: (1) acquisition, the ability to pinpoint, identify, assess and obtain operation-critical external knowledge; (2) assimilation, the comprehension of externally acquired knowledge; (3) transformation, the ability to merge old knowledge with newly acquired and assimilated knowledge; and (4) exploitation, the ability to incorporate the obtained, assimilated and transformed knowledge into usable organisational routines. According to Walter (2021) [17], capacity emphasises a focus on knowledge while OA maintains a focus on handling change; absorptive capacity is perpetual, while OA occurs only in response to changes in the environment.…”

Open-Innovation Practices: Diversity in Portuguese SMEs

“…The success of the outside-in approach implies that companies have a good absorptive capacity; i.e., the ability to recognize value in external information, assimilate it, and use it for business purposes [47,48]. Therefore, the cognitive constraint of firms is a factor that limits the adoption of this approach.…”