Knowledge sharing, knowledge leaking in strategic alliances and firm innovation capacity: an empirical study

Abstract

This study aims to examine the influence of firms’ alliance knowledge on their innovation capacity, under the contingencies of both intentional and unintentional leakage of business-critical knowledge. Based on a survey of 410 staff from 205 allied firms in Tunisia, this study applies the linear regression to investigate the research model. The results show that external knowledge sharing appears to have a positive effect on firms’ innovative capability while high levels of intentional and unintentional knowledge leakage by a focal firms’ employees, turns out to negatively moderate such a relationship. In this paper, actors of focal firm need to distinguish between the firms' critical knowledge, and the one which can be legally shared and exchanged with other partners. Sharing critical knowledge, intentionally or unintentionally, might hurt the focal firms’ innovative capacity. Although the issues of knowledge sharing and innovation have been exhaustively treated in the literature, very little are the research works which have undertaken to study the links between knowledge sharing, knowledge leakage and the firms’ innovation capacity.  Thus, this study is designed to foster further enrichment to the literature, by proposing more clear differentiation between unintentional and intentional knowledge leakages and their impact on the firm’s innovation.