AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

In the Chilean wine industry, the lack of resources, as well as the lack of highly developed knowledge sources (from research programs and institutions) and professional workers, have impeded it from reaching a higher position amongst the leaders of wine producing countries. Therefore, experts suggest clustering based on geographic wine zones as the business scheme to compete. Through the brand image of a cluster, wineries could develop activities that would not be possible on their own. Similarly, actions pursued within a cluster may foster an innovation prone atmosphere; therefore wineries may benefit from this innovative scheme, to reach new markets or increase their market share, and finally, to develop competitive advantage. This project uses the Chilean wine industry organized as clusters to ascertain whether the cluster environment fosters the surge, development and implementation of innovative activities based upon an adapted framework namely the Innovation Value Chain (IVC). This model examines the process of innovation as a three-stage process. It was selected as it allows the analysis of the aggregation of individual innovations goals (from persons and individual firms within a cluster) at a cluster level, and how these are developed into commercialized actions. Wineries from one Chilean wine cluster, i.e. the Maule region, were analysed in terms of their IVC framework to explore differences amongst wineries, but also between different stages of innovation in a winery. Results from descriptive and inferential analysis, demonstrated that wineries were innovative, but differences were observed amongst wineries’ innovativeness during the process of innovation development for individual wineries. This highlights the importance of the development of strategies aimed to enhance the extent and quality of networks amongst wineries, but also between wineries and other agents related to and beyond the cluster in order to increase the performance of wineries concerned. This project makes three significant contributions: (1) it describes the performance of clustered wineries with regards to their process of innovation development; (2) it provides recommendations to both wineries’ managers/owners and policy makers on how to face the challenges of the wine industry; and (3) it enhances the understanding of innovation for clustered wineries in Chile. Further work for this project includes statistical test of the IVC framework as well as the use of qualitative data. Moreover, comparisons among wine clusters of different countries would be worth pursuing.