Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
wine: the wine vintage, the wine area and the market price. This indicator is valued 1
when any of the i rm's wines has been assigned at least 70 points in years 2003-05, the
minimum threshold for a wine to be considered of drinkable quality and to be recom-
mended by the journal. It is valued 0 otherwise. A lag of two years is allowed between
the year in which the interviews were carried out and the vintage of the most recent rated
wines.
10
The second indicator (2) is a measure of the export propensity of i rms (
Export
) and it
tries to correct the fact that about 70 per cent of i rms were not rated under (1), especially
in the Colline Pisane cluster where only 12 per cent of the i rms were rated. Since the
objective of this chapter is not to explore the performance of i rms in absolute terms (i.e.
compared with competing i rms on international markets), but to assess the degree to
which i rms diverge in their performance relative to the cluster, it seemed appropriate to
consider other dimensions of performance. The share of exports, compared to total pro-
duction, is a very rough approximation of performance. However, qualitative evidence
collected in the i eld suggests that highly exporting i rms are normally considered in this
sector to be more successful.
Independent variables
The i rst independent variable is the
knowledge network
. This
network refers only to knowledge that is transferred or received with the specii c purpose
of solving technical problems. The questions formulated to collect knowledge network
data are reported below:
Q1
If you are in a critical situation and need technical advice, to which of the local i rms men-
tioned in the roster do you turn?
[Please rate the importance you attach to the knowledge linkage established with each of
the i rms according to its persistence and quality, on the basis of the following scale: 0 =
none; 1 = low; 2 = medium; 3 = high].
Q2
Which of the following i rms do you think have benei ted from technical support from this
i rm?
[Please rate the importance you attach to the knowledge linkage established with each of
the i rms according to its persistence and quality, on the basis of the following scale: 0 =
none; 1 = low; 2 = medium; 3 = high].
These questions specii cally address problem solving and technical assistance because
they involve some ef ort in producing improvements and change within the economic
activity of a i rm. This is meant to go beyond the mere transfer of information, whose
access can be easily attained through other channels (e.g. trade fairs, the internet, spe-
cialised reviews etc.). Instead, the interest here is to investigate whether local stocks of
contextualised complex knowledge are not only accessible but also eventually absorbed
by localised i rms. So, for example, knowledge is transferred by providing a suggestion
on how to treat a new pest or how to deal with high levels of wine acidity during fer-
mentation. Accordingly, the knowledge transferred is normally the reply to a query on a
complex problem that has emerged and that the i rm seeks to solve.
These questions have been used to construct an
n
×
n
matrix. Each cell in the matrix
reports the existence of knowledge being transferred from i rm
i
in the row to i rm
j
in the
column. I use dichotomous data so in the matrix there is a 1 in the (
i
,
j
) cell if i rm
i
has
transferred knowledge to i rm
j
. Cell (
i
,
j
) contains a 0 when no transfer of knowledge has
been reported to occur between i rm
i
and
j
. This is a directed matrix.
