What drives the adoption of new technologies in Italian wine industry

The importance of the new technologies and innovation into firms could have multiple and positive impacts: cost-reduction, product differentiation, process innovation, and improvements of managerial organization. The new shape of competition is pushing towards the application of strict rules and techniques for wine standardization, processes optimization, certifications and cost reduction in order to increase the international competitiveness. Through the past decades, consumers’ awareness towards food safety issues, environment and ethical implications of productions has increased, making consumers’ behaviour a more complex subject to study. Lately, the impact of crisis on purchasing power has been rising as well as the globalization, which is pushing towards an increasing internationalization of Italian wine products. Seemingly, the competitive arena, regulation and policy incentives are pushing industry to increase R&D investments. Nonetheless, the adoption of new technologies could be also driven also by internal factors to the industry. A large body of the innovation literature has already investigated the adoption of new technologies and the drivers of innovation in many sectors, thus, theory is consolidated and key drivers have been extensively explored. However, to the knowledge of the authors, not much has been done with respect to specific food sectors. Under the light of growing needs and academic interests on the topic, this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the adoption of the newer technologies with specific reference to the wine industry in Italy. On the basis of a large survey on Italian wine companies carried out in 2013 we investigate the main areas of investment in innovations and the key drivers of their adoption. In this paper we offer a comprehensive analysis of the drivers of innovation activity and adoption of new technologies in the Italian wine industry, which include the assessment of demand factors, supply factors, technological and organizational capabilities, significance of regulation and standards. Based on the body of literature, the paper explores specifically the following hypotheses: - Firm characteristics such as economic size and number of employees impacts the likelihood of adopting new technologies because of scale economies; - Employees skills impacts absorptive capacity, thus, the possibility of implementing the new technologies more easily; - Networking and shared knowledge among firms, across the supply chain, and with universities and research centres increases the proximity with innovation oriented knowledge, thus, newer technologies; - Demand factors impact innovation behaviour, especially export orientation. The hypotheses have been tested throughout an econometric model. Results concerns the key drivers of the newer technologies adoption leading to a number of policy implication that could eventually be useful to develop specific actions to support innovation in such a peculiar and diversified sector