Assessment of the Relationship between Business Network and Geographical Indication

The adoption of geographical indication (GI) in emerging countries, such as Brazil is growing over the last few years, pursuing the success obtained by global collective. A GI is related to the network of actors in its region of coverage. This paper aims to develop a business network maturity model (BNMM) to support networks to understand the factors influencing its development in order to evaluate the benefits obtained by cooperation and GI. The proposed framework consists of key factors: management, relationships, knowledge, process and services, that trigger 15 constructs of an assessment instrument. In order to provide an initial verification of the developed framework, the questionnaire was applied with three selected networks of wineries and brewers. Findings show that having a GI does not necessarily result in a deep use of it, and a process of collective learning and joint actions would improve the potential benefits obtained with it.