4

The aim of this paper is to analyze the factors influencing firms’behavior, with regards to the adoption of electronic traceability systems in the French industrial firms, by taking into account the firm’s sectoral and geographic environment. Traceability, or the capacity to trace a product through all stages of a supply chain, has become an important instrument to ensure quality, as well as an interesting tool for the codification of information between firms, carried by the development of ICT. A model of technology adoption is tested using original data representative of the entire French industrial sectors. The objective is to show the role played by industrial and spatial dynamics on a firm’s behaviors, and to test the existence of sectoral specificities. The results evidence that the firm’s adoption process depends on the complementarities between their organizational and environmental characteristics. Different adoption profiles are shown, depending on the firm’s sector and on the different ways in which firms interact with its spatial environment.