Leading firms and wine clusters: understanding the evolution of the Tuscan wine industry through an international comparative analysis

The general objective of this research is to analyze the relationship existing between entrepreneurship and territory in the wine business. We will analyze few significant business/territorial experiences located both in Italy and abroad in order to catch the ongoing changes of international competition in the wine market. At an international level some general changes emerged that radically modified the wine industry both on the offer side (with the rise of New World production countries challenging the traditional European wine producers) and on the demand side (changes in the wine consumption habits). After years of good performances, this new scenario has certainly influenced the competitiveness of the Italian wine firms whose world market share has decreased. To understand if this is the result of a mere conjunctural crisis or also of structural changes in the traditional models of production the specific research questions are: a) what are the main competitive forces determining a change in the wine business; b) what are the main characteristics of a wine cluster and how important the territory is in the differentiation of the firms’ performance; c) within the wine clusters, what are the main differences between leading and non-leading firms in terms of assets and behaviors; d) what are the main implications under a marketing perspective of the emergence of leading firms within wine clusters; it makes more and more important to reach a new equilibrium between the brand strategies of individual enterprises and collective promotion actions at cluster level; e) what are the economic evolution trajectories followed by some Tuscan high quality wine production systems in comparison with some foreign wine entrepreneurial experiences