Tourism and Innovation

Tourism is often described as an industry with high growth rates, and it is subject to radical change in how it is produced and consumed. However, there is still a relatively poor understanding of how such changes are brought about – that is, through innovation. This book is the first 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 timely book places tourism innovation in the context of current academic and policy concerns relating to knowledge, competition, and the management of change. A substantial introductory chapter provides an overview of what makes innovation in tourism both distinctive from, and similar to innovation in other economic sectors. This is followed by three general scene setting chapters which explore how competition and the search for competitiveness drive tourism innovation, how knowledge transfers and knowledge 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 the firm, to the consumer. The next four chapters analyze innovation at different scales. Two chapters review the territorial dimensions of innovation through the fresh perspectives of the national and regional innovation systems, followed by reviews of the determinants of innovation in the firm, and the contested and complex role of entrepreneurship. The final chapter summarises the importance of understanding tourism innovation.

This is a groundbreaking volume which provides an accessible introduction to a key but neglected topic. It provides a readable account of the multidisciplinary research on innovation and relates the emerging theoretical framework to tourism. A clear conceptual framework is complemented by fifty boxes which provide a range of illustrative international case studies.

This book will be a useful guide for researchers and students of tourism studies, management and business and geography.

C. Michael Hall is Professor of Marketing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Docent in the Department of Geography at the 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 European Integration and Globalization at the London Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author and editor of a number of books on tourism including Critical Issues in Tourism (2002) and Tourism and Tourism Spaces (2004), both with Gareth Shaw; and A Companion to Tourism Geography (2004), with Alan Lew and Michael Hall.