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’ geographical proximity and their embeddedness in local business networks (BNs) factors that positively affect their learning and innovation processes. More recently, have started to claim that firm-specific characteristics should be considered to central in the process of learning and innovation in clusters. This article contributes this latter direction of research. It applies social network analysis to explore the properties of knowledge networks in three wine clusters in Italy and Chile. results show that in spite of firms’ geographical proximity and the pervasiveness of BNs, innovation-related knowledge is diffused in clusters in a highly selective and way. This pattern is found to be related to the heterogeneous and asymmetric of firm knowledge bases in the clusters.