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

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach The research model was tested in a sample of companies through the use of structural equations by the partial least squares method. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.