The selective nature of knowledge networks in clusters: evidence from the wine industry

Most of the studies about industrial clusters and innovation stress the importance of firms' geographical proximity and their embeddedness in local business networks (BNs) as factors that positively affect their learning and innovation processes. More recently, scholars have started to claim th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of economic geography 2007-03, Vol.7 (2), p.139-168
Main Author: Giuliani, Elisa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business innovation
Business networking
Business structures
Economic geography
Economists
Experimentation
Geographic regions
Geography
Industrial concentration
Innovation diffusion
Innovations
Knowledge
Knowledge bases
Learning
Local businesses
Organizational learning
Public good
R&D
Research & development
Social network analysis
Social networks
Studies
Technological innovation
Wine industry
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Summary:Most of the studies about industrial clusters and innovation stress the importance of firms' geographical proximity and their embeddedness in local business networks (BNs) as factors that positively affect their learning and innovation processes. More recently, scholars have started to claim that firm-specific characteristics should be considered to be central in the process of learning and innovation in clusters. This article contributes to this latter direction of research. It applies social network analysis to explore the structural properties of knowledge networks in three wine clusters in Italy and Chile. The results show that in spite of firms' geographical proximity and the pervasiveness of local BNs, innovation-related knowledge is diffused in clusters in a highly selective and uneven way. This pattern is found to be related to the heterogeneous and asymmetric distribution of firm knowledge bases in the clusters.
ISSN:1468-2702
1468-2710
DOI:10.1093/jeg/lbl014