Firm Creation, Firm Evolution and Clusters in Chile’s Dynamic Wine Sector: Evidence from the Colchagua and Casablanca Regions

depression and the fourth is the contact zone between this flat land and the Andean
foothills in the east, where conditions are warm though moderated by mountain
downdraughts and southerly winds. Colchagua covers these latter two regions as well.

Methodology

On June 20, 2008, ICARE, an NGO founded by major Chilean companies and devoted to
promoting national business improvement and applied research, selected Jorge Matetic as
best business and Concha y Toro as best firm for innovation. This research aims to
demonstrate how the Chilean wine sector has developed enormously in the last twenty
years and is now one of Chile’s leading export sectors. In particular, it hopes to
demonstrate that the wine industry is a dynamic wine sector that has relied heavily on
incorporating innovations not only from global chains of enterprises but also from local
networks of firms.

The study has used qualitative methods as these were considered most appropriate to
explore the process of innovation and knowledge transfer within firms and enterprises
located in what has been defined as a dynamic industrial sector. Qualitative data was
collected through in-depth interviews in order to engage with the biographies of key
actors in the wine industry in the Sixth and Fifth Regions of Chile. Another primary
source of data was that available from the organisation ‘Wines of Chile’ and Census data
from the National Institute of Statistics. Further information was taken from secondary
sources. It should be noted that when material available was in Spanish the author has
translated it and put the original citation in footnotes. Information was gathered mainly
by interviews with fifteen wineries from the two valleys in the period of March 2008 to

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