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Tourism Innovation

Tourism and Innovation

This book is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive review of innovation in tourism, while also considering how tourism itself contributes to innovative local, regional and national development strategies. This is a timely book placing tourism innovation in the context of current academic and policy concerns relating to knowledge, competition and the management of change. An introductory chapter describes how innovation in tourism is both distinctive from and similar to innovation in other sectors. This is followed by three chapters that explore how competition drives tourism innovation, how knowledge transfers and creation lead the process, and how institutions shape innovation. These provide a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the roles of different agencies in innovation, ranging from the state, to firms, and consumers. The next four chapters analyse innovation at different scales, reviewing the territorial dimensions of innovation through the fresh perspectives of national and regional innovation systems, as well as the determinants of innovation in the tourism firm, and the contested and complex role of entrepreneurship. The final chapter summarises the importance of understanding tourism innovation. This ground-breaking volume provides an accessible introduction to a key but neglected topic. A clear conceptual framework is complemented by numerous illustrative international case studies. This book will be a useful guide for researchers and students of tourism studies, management and business, geography and regional studies. C. Michael Hall is Professor of Marketing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Docent in the Department of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland. Co-editor of Current Issues in Tourism, his main research interests are in the relationships between mobility and regional development, tourism, food, global environmental change and environmental history. Allan M. Williams is Professor of...