Incubator initiative: Wine Industry RD&E: developing partner co-creation capabilities
Abstract
This research supports the work of Wine Australia by identifying capabilities required to bring together research institutes, wine producers, and others in the wine sector to integrate resources and skills in a way that achieves superior RD&E outcomes. Through a series of interviews and an exploratory survey, several capabilities required for successful R&D collaboration are identified; market knowledge, absorptive capacity, technological competence, network and alliance capabilities, co-creation capability and the capability to build capabilities. The study suggests all partners should focus on developing relational capabilities, while firms low on technical capabilities should focus on developing their capacity to build capabilities.
Summary
The global wine industry has undergone a period of dramatic modernisation and transformation, founded in changes of market and production characteristics as well as advances in technology (Giuliani et al., 2010). To develop a competitive advantage in the global wine industry, new wine producing regions in particular have responded, investing heavily in research and development (R&D) activities. Indeed, to extract the full value of its investments, Wine Australia needs to be able to draw on research institutes, wine producers, and various other actors within the wine sector to work together and integrate their resources, strengths, skills and capabilities towards mutual goals. University-industry collaborations are now recognised as important mechanisms for providing R&D services known to stimulate the economic cycle of innovation and growth (Berbegal-Mirabent et al., 2015), offering a unique opportunity to integrate the diverse resources that exist within the respective partners. For example, while the involvement of regional wine producers enables research institutions the physical resources (e.g. the grapes) and practical insight to facilitate research that will benefit the industry, researchers offer the scientific expertise and tools facilitating innovation. The question remains, however, what capabilities are needed for organisations to co-create value from RD&E efforts and how these capabilities can be developed. This research thus aims at supporting Wine Australia by developing recommendations on how to strengthen and increase research-industry collaboration and its value, by (1) recognizing the capabilities that enable successful R&D collaboration, (2) identifying how these capabilities are developed, (3) determining how they can be measured, as well as (4) exploring the impact of capabilities on relevant collaboration and adoption outcomes, including an analysis of capability constellations. A two-phased research study was thus undertaken within the Australian wine context. The first phase, a series of in-depth interviews with key informants knowledgeable about university-industry R&D collaborations in the wine industry, enabled the identification of relevant capabilities (aim 1) and the potential to mutually develop capabilities within the collaboration (aim 2). Based on this insight, an exploratory quantitative study was conducted by means of an online survey, which enabled the identification and adaptation of suitable scales (aim 3), explore the extant capabilities in the organisations involved as well as their outcomes (aim 4), as well as determine capability constellations driving value perceptions, interest in participating in future R&D collaborations as well as innovation adoption (aim 5). We are grateful for the incubator grant incubator funding received from Wine Australia (AGWA), enabling us to complete this research.