When the growth is driven by technology transfer: different organizational search path in the Italian wine industry

The aim of this work is to provide empirical evidence of a diffusion process of a template across firms within a network of technological experts. The context of the analysis is represented by the population of premium winemakers in Italy. A dramatic crisis in the ’80 triggered an industry re-definition involving distinct combinations of exploitation, exploration and replication behaviours. The population of firms evolved with the population of technological experts as a community of experts. In order to capture this coevolution, this study firstly develops a network model representing the diffusion of templates along inter organizational ties; secondly it identifies determinants and outcomes of organizational behaviours, including core/periphery and centrality scores in a Poisson regression. If past history of firm has now passed by, this work proposes possible strategic directions for the future.