Reference Case Study, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Italian winemaking industry provides a fruitful context for the empirical research on technological and organizational issues concerning the networked enterprise. The structure of Italian economy is mainly based on networks of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), as the result of a specific historical process. Often these networks have assumed peculiar organizational forms (e.g. Italian industrial districts) inspiring new approaches to the management of inter-firms flows of data and resources. The specific nature of SMEs, as incomplete organizational entities (e.g. limited investments in information systems, absence of internal technical staff units), forces SMEs entrepreneurs to strengthen relationships with external actors, especially in order to share complementary assets, like trade channels or R&D efforts. Nevertheless, the winemaking industry shows some peculiar features of typical problems in the networked enterprises, since the complex relationships between all the actors of the supply chain concern not only virtual resources (e.g. marketing services), but also physical resources resulting from the interactions between agricultural activities, manufacturing processes and customer relationship management services.