Case Study: The Spanish Wine Industry

The results of the model, try to explain business performance for the three types of companies studied for the Spanish wine sector, present differentiated elements. The relationship between resources and capabilities is evident, along with the strategy with the business result, but this varies depending on the type of company.

Regarding the influence of resources and capabilities (technological and managerial capabilities), only the technological one shows its importance in the explanation of the company's performance, but only for cooperatives and mercantile companies. Several authors have highlighted the importance of resources or technology to explain the best organizational performance capabilities. However, our results show that technological capabilities have no influence on the performance of individual companies, nor are management capabilities relevant in any of the types of the companies analyzed. It is important to highlight that the fact that a resource does not give an explanation of the business result, does not mean that it is not important in the industry, it only means that it is not an explanatory variable of the competitive advantage, the resources must be scarce, relevant, durable, non-transferable and non-replicable.

In relation to strategy, the results show that it explains the business result for the individual companies and for the mercantile companies, not being related to the performance as in the case of cooperatives. Of the five types of strategies analyzed and extracted by the technique of principal components, from the scale of Robinson and Pearce, only three are significant with business performance: in the case of the individual companies marketing strategy and efficiency strategy; and for the mercantile companies marketing strategy and innovation strategy, are the drivers of the performance.

With regard to the joint effect of resources and capabilities, and the strategy, and its synergistic effect to explain business performance, the results show that only in mercantile companies has this effect appeared, being the combination of technological capabilities, and marketing and innovation strategies, the elements that correlate with the best business results. This synergic factor does not appear in individual companies, where it is only the strategy that is seen as the driver of the performance and neither is it seen in cooperatives where the technological capabilities are the explanation of their better performance.

The relationship between resources and capabilities, and strategy, can be observed in the values of the correlation matrix, without distinguishing according to the type of company. Thus, among the strategies related to the best performance (efficiency, marketing and innovation), and the resources and capabilities studied, it presents the following values. The efficiency strategy has a correlation of 0.306 with technological capabilities and 0.308 with management capabilities. Marketing strategy 0.448 with technological capabilities and 0.347 with management. And the innovation strategy does not have a significant correlation with technological capabilities and 0.185 with management capabilities.