Clusters life cycle and multilevel orchestration: Evidence from the wine cluster of Serra Gaúcha

Clusters are recognized for their social and economic impact on the firms and regions where they are inserted. However, discussion about the decline of clusters has grown since many clusters in the world have been significantly affected by economic and social decline, derived in many cases by the lock-in effect. Recent studies point to possible factors that can prevent the decline of clusters; however, they do not explain how to articulate the actors and actions along their trajectory. Thus, orchestration capacity emerges as an approach to understand this gap. Therefore, the present paper sought to analyze how the cluster life cycle influences orchestration governance. For that, an exploratory study was performed with a longitudinal perspective of the Wine Cluster of Serra Gaúcha (WCSG), in Brazil. This cluster was chosen because it has gone through and overcome several crises during its trajectory and because of its social and economic importance for the region. As a main result, we advocate multi-orchestration with multilevel performance to promote innovation and avoid the lock-in effect in the cluster trajectory.