Dr. Alessio Cavicchi, IGCAT´s International Expert from Italy, is leading a new EU university-business project called The Wine Lab. It is widely recognised that small wineries achieve better performance when they are networked or clustered, but often firms located in areas that are geographically disadvantaged, have difficulties also in establishing relationships that are crucial for their survival. Isolation, limited access to learning opportunities against the need of a range of competences different from production – as a small business is still a business, characterise the target group.
The aim of The Wine Lab is to create a knowledge alliance between Universities in Agriculture, Oenology and related fields, and small wineries located in disadvantaged areas, to stimulate knowledge flow, share problems and solutions, and jointly generate innovation in the wine sector. The Wine Lab creates the basis for a dialogue between research, business and regional communities, based upon clustering and networking, and aimed at providing learning opportunities applying action and experiential research and learning, and at exploiting knowledge on regional bases towards new methods and approaches in policy planning.