**6. Limitations and directions for future research**

Despite providing a complete picture of South American emerging markets, since this study was performed in a consumer goods packaged company in different countries, the applicability of our findings to other industries needs to be tested.

A more detailed examination of a bigger number of firms, on other taxonomical industries [11], would give us more insightful information of the innovation process. Additionally, cross-functional relationships are affected by a wide range of factors; thus, future research could draw on other frameworks such as the impact of different "linkage devices" on trust and how social network mechanisms help firms internalize resources and transform them into product and process innovation.

From the methodological point of view, despite being recently studied [3, 22], future work could add objective measures to the subjective construct of "perceived relationship effectiveness", such as new product turnover, market share and mix participation inter alia.
