Invited Commentary Article

Tourism Economics
1–16
Innovation in tourism: ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1354816618773189
journals.sagepub.com/home/teu
of research in need
of a synthesis
Sandro Montresor
Kore University of Enna, Italy

Abstract
This commentary note critically re-examines the extant literature on innovation in tourism and
delineates the pattern that has characterized its development over the last two decades. By
referring to different reviews and integrating them with the inspection of subsequent contribu-
tions, a divergence is identified with respect to some core aspects of the innovation literature. The
motivations and the implications of this divergence are discussed. In particular, some risks are
identified in its continuation, which an alternative synthetic combination between tourism and
innovation studies could curb.

Keywords
innovation, services, tourism

Introduction
Innovation in tourism has attracted increasing attention in the academic research of the last two
decades. According to the most recent review of the literature (Omerzel, 2016), from 1992 to 2014
(September), more than 300 articles containing ‘innovation’ and ‘tourism’ (in at least one of title,
abstract and keywords) have been published in peer-reviewed journals within the Web of
Knowledge database. On a yearly basis, the number of publications has grown over time, with a
marked increase from 2004 onward. Following an equivalent search criterion, further 36 published
articles can be found in the same database (within economics and business-related fields) from
2014 to 2018 (February), nearly 70 when the reference is to Scopus-listed journals (same dis-
ciplinary domains). In both cases, their distribution over time has become however flatter.

Corresponding author:
Sandro Montresor, Faculty of Economics and Law, Kore University of Enna, Cittadella Universitaria, 94100 Enna, Italy.
Email: sandro.montresor@unikore.it
2 Tourism Economics XX(X)

Looking at the subject of the hosting journals it appears evident that, while distributed across
different disciplines – like economics, business and management, environmental and geography
studies – the academic debate on the topic has occurred nearly exclusively within tourism research.
Out of this field, publications have been scanty so far – for example, only 30 out of the 315 (9.5%)
journal publications found by Omerzel (2016) – and, what is more, nearly absent from the most
accredited journals in the economics and management of innovation – only 4 in the last 30 years
(Martı́nez-Ros and Orfila-Sintes, 2009; Martı́nez-Pérez et al., 2015; Mattsson et al., 2005; Sundbo
et al., 2007). In spite of the partial nature of this bibliometric evidence, it seems that in investi-
gating tourism innovation, scholars have been following what nearly 10 years ago Anne-Mette
Hjalager (2010: 8) called a ‘diverging line’ of research. According to this approach, the peculia-
rities of tourism will be such to make the analysis of its innovation unsuitable to be addressed with
the theoretical lenses and the empirical methodologies so far developed to investigate innovation in
manufacturing and in the service sector in general, thus justifying the divergence from them,
apparently also in terms of publication outlet. An additional and possibly more insightful proxy of
the cogency of this research approach is the number of submissions of tourism papers so far made
to innovation journals, reflecting a plausible effort towards an alternative ‘converging’ line of
research (Hjalager, 2010: 8). Just to make some examples, according to the evidence provided by
their editors, from 2015 to date, ‘Innovation: Organization and Management’ (http://www.tand
fonline.com/toc/rimp20/current) has received and rejected only five submissions containing
‘tourism’ as a keyword (still, in title, abstract and keywords), out of a total of 1113. Over the same
period, only one paper on the topic, out of 969 submissions, has been received and rejected by
‘Industry and Innovation’ (http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ciai20). The relative incidence of
(rejected) submissions is drastically lower in the current top journal in the field, Research Policy
(https://www.journals.elsevier.com/research-policy/), amounting to 3 out of 6089 submissions.
In the next section, I will argue that such a diverging line of research is actually manifest in
some crucial choices, which the extant literature on tourism innovation reveals in various theo-
retical and empirical respects. As I will also argue, these choices go beyond the opportunity/need to
differentiate the analysis of tourism innovation from ‘standard’ innovations and could possibly be
turned into more convergent ones. In ‘The risks of diverging (and converging) and the opportunity
of synthesizing tourism and innovation studies’ section, I will speculate on some possible adverse
consequences of such a diverging line of research. In the same section, I will also take position for a
more promising ‘synthetic’ approach to the issue, which Tourism Economics could contribute to
host and promote.

Tourism innovation and innovation studies: Differences and

divergences
‘Tourism is different’! This is a very recurrent tenet in many papers on tourism innovations
(Omerzel, 2016), generally taken to justify a different approach to their analysis, not only with
respect to innovation in manufacturing, but also in the majority of the other services. On the one
hand, the intangible and perishable nature of tourism ‘products’, along with the co-terminality
between their production and consumption (Hjalager, 2002), are claimed to make unsuitable
models and hypotheses so far developed to investigate manufacturing innovations (Djellal and
Gallouj, 2001; Sundbo and Gallouj, 2000). Accordingly, an ‘autonomy’ or ‘demarcation’
approach, originally followed by the analysis of service innovations in general (Coombs and Miles,
2000), appears amenable to be extended to tourism innovations.
Montresor 3

On the other hand, even a service-based logic has been retained inappropriate for the analysis of
innovation in tourism (Eide et al., 2017), because of its idiosyncratic ‘product’ and structural
characteristics. As for the former, tourism products are generally more complex than other ser-
vices, as they typically assume the nature of bundles of different constitutive services, or ‘service
packages’ (Normann, 1991), provided by several players, and which often combine with jointly
supplied goods (Volo, 2006). Furthermore, to a larger extent than other services, tourism products
are experience-oriented rather than functional-oriented (Sundbo et al., 2013), as they generate
value also and above all for their impact on customers’ emotions and memories, rather than on the
satisfaction of their needs. As for the tourism industry, its differences with respect to other service
sectors for the sake of innovation have been widely documented (Camisón and Monfort-Mir,
2012). The sector is highly heterogeneous and cover activities – typically structured into lod-
ging and accommodations, tourism intermediaries, restaurants, transportation operators and
attractions (Volo, 2006) – to which innovation applies to a variable extent. It is highly fragmented
too and dominated by small companies, which typically lack research and development resources
and adopt externally developed technologies, rather than inventing themselves (Hjalager, 2006):
their low and/or semi-skilled human capital represents an additional obstacle for that to happen.
Given the high replicability and imitability of its products, tourism is also marked by weak
cooperation among firms and by a limited diffusion of open ways of innovating: in spite of the
diffusion of networks and network organizational forms, these heavily rely on intermediaries (e.g.
destination institutions), which attenuate direct contacts among firms (Novelli et al., 2006). Last,
but not least, tourism companies operate with respect to tourism destinations, which involve other
tourism actors and make innovations emerge also at the territorial level, in addition to the firm
level (Hall, 2009). Because of all these (and possibly other) idiosyncratic features, the analysis of
tourism innovation would require a further ‘demarcation’ approach, this time from services, whose
theories of innovation (e.g. those developed with respect to knowledge-intensive business ones) are
only limitedly suitable to the specificities of tourism (e.g. to its low knowledge intensity; Miles,
2000).
In the extant literature, the opportunity of a demarcation approach – ‘single’ (with respect to
manufacturing) or even ‘double’ (with respect to manufacturing and services) – to the analysis of
tourism innovation is variably recognized in explicit terms (Camisón and Monfort-Mir, 2012).
Still, either explicitly or implicitly, such an analysis has translated into a number of choices, which
actually reveal a diverging pattern of research with respect to the literature on the economics and
management of innovation. In particular, these choices concern (i) the way in which innovation is
defined and conceptualized in tourism, (ii) the typologies of tourism innovations that are identified,
(iii) the theoretical foundations of the drivers and the economic effects of tourism innovations and
(iv) the empirical methodologies adopted for their investigation.

From innovation to tourism innovation, . . . and back to innovation

Nearly all the studies on tourism innovation start by recognizing that, while an inevitable point of
departure, the classical Schumpeter’s (1955) definition of innovation is mainly technological in
nature and thus too narrow to embrace its occurrence in tourism. A wider conceptualization is
retained necessary to account for those non-technological innovations, which pervade tourism as a
service sector, in particular in the form of new organizational and marketing practices (Camisón
and Monfort-Mir, 2012). Accordingly, the ‘dual-core’ model proposed by Daft (1978) – distin-
guishing between innovations in the ‘technological core’ (‘technical system’) and in the
4 Tourism Economics XX(X)

‘administrative core’ (‘social system’) of the firm – and its operative translation into the third
edition of the Oslo Manual (OECD, 2005) – for the measurement of scientific and technological
activities – is often taken as a more reliable conceptual reference to deal with tourism innovation
(Hjalager, 2010). On the other hand, much of the extant literature feels uncomfortable also with
this latter ‘service-friendly’ definition of innovation, in terms of ‘implementation of a new or
significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new
organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relationship’
(OECD, 2005). While wider, this conceptualization and the measurement methodologies that are
based on it – for example, the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) in Europe and several com-
posite innovation indicators at the international level (by the World Economic Forum, World Bank
and the like) – would not be capable to capture more granular forms of change, which have been
claimed to represent ‘innovations’ other than ‘pure’ marketing and organizational ones in tourism
(Camisón and Monfort-Mir, 2012), like changes in: the modalities tourism services are provided
(Ottenbacher and Gnoth, 2005) and commercialized (Gronroos, 1990); the relationships through
which tourism companies interact with their customers and with other actors of the value chain; the
systems of institutions tourism players are embedded in, especially at the territorial (e.g. tourism
destination) level (Hall, 2009); and the business models tourism companies adopt to exploit their
innovations (Hjalager, 2002).
The way in which tourism research has tried to ‘crystallise’ this last kind of observed changes
into innovations is twofold. On the one hand, more encompassing definitions of innovations have
been provided, which extend both the ‘form’ (i.e. the functional domain in which they manifest)
and the ‘impact’ (i.e. the geographical domain) of the changes, which could be considered as
innovative in tourism (on this, see e.g. the wide definitions provided in Hall and Williams, 2008).
On the other hand, new ways of defining the kind of change that would amount to a tourism
innovation have been proposed. For example, Camisón and Monfort-Mir (2012) have suggested
that innovation in tourism should refer to the ‘capacity’ to change – that is, the ‘dynamic cap-
abilities’ through which firms learn to face change (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000) – rather than to
the outcome/performance of the same capacity, to which the Schumpeterian approach instead
alludes. Along a similar vein, Nordli (2017) proposes to look for tourism innovation in the process
of value co-creation – with suppliers and customers – that typically constitutes the ‘service logic’
(Grönroos and Voima, 2013). Keeping the focus on innovation as output/performance, a new
conceptualization of it has been proposed by looking at tourism through the lens of the ‘experience
economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). According to Volo (2006), those technological and non-
technological changes that the providers of a ‘tourism experience’ introduce in any component of
the ‘tourism bundle’ can be deemed innovation providing they affect the experience of tourists in
one of its constitutive dimensions (‘accessibility’, ‘affection’, ‘convenience’ and ‘value’). Along
the same experience-based approach to tourism (Stamboulis and Skayannis, 2003), the ideas of
‘experience innovation’ and of ‘experience concept innovation’ have been put forward and
investigated in specific tourism segments (e.g. Eide et al., 2017; Eriksen, 2015; Jernsand et al.,
2015).
Both of the above approaches represent interesting attempts to identify tourism-specific forms
of innovation, which would remain otherwise ‘hidden’ (Camisón and Monfort-Mir, 2012; Nordli,
2017). On the other hand, both of them have been implemented by ‘diverging’, not only from a
narrow Schumpeterian definition of innovation, which the extant literature on innovation has also
progressively extended (e.g. through the different versions of the Oslo Manual). But divergence
has also occurred from the Schumpeterian conditions that make a ‘simple’ kind of change an actual
Montresor 5

innovation, which the innovation literature instead keeps retaining pivotal. The first of these
conditions is the novelty and the reproducibility of an innovative change, which the extension (in
Drejer’s words, ‘the infection’) of the forms of innovation to be included in tourism (as well as in
services) has been made hard to inspect. As Hjalager (2010) noticed in her first and seminal review
of the literature,

[i]n practice and in many of the empirical studies, enquirers are willing to accept that innovation is
generally characterised by everything that differs from business as usual or which represents a dis-
continuance of previous practice in some sense for the innovating firm (p. 2).

With some few exceptions (e.g. Gallouj and Sundbo, 1998; Hjalager, 2002; Martı́nez-Ros and
Orfila-Sintes, 2009), the degree of novelty required to be in presence of actual innovations is rarely
addressed in tourism research, which accordingly tends to downplay the distinction between
radical and incremental ones, as unsuitable to account for the variety of mainly smooth kinds of
changes characterizing the tourism sector (Brooker and Joppe, 2014). On the other hand, such a
claim would prevent one to retain the evidence of an even ‘disruptive’ kind innovation (like
Airbnb), which the sector has recently shown (Garcı́a-Villaverde et al., 2017; Guttentag, 2015).
Even more divergent is the choice about the relevance that the Schumpeterian theory attributes
to the capacity of producing a viable economic impact, for a change to be considered an actual
innovation. On the one hand, the scanty number of systematic studies that Hjalager (2010) had
detected about the economic impact of innovation in tourism enterprises and destinations has
remained so also in the following years (Omerzel, 2016), and is still dominated by non-
generalizable case-based evidence (see ‘The empirical analysis of tourism innovation and its
‘biases’ section below). On the other hand, the new conceptualizations of tourism innovation, in
terms of capabilities and experience, have made the search for an economic impact of secondary
importance in the identification of tourism innovation, and focused the attention on a less strictly
economic kind of effects.
On the basis of the previous considerations, it seems plausible to argue that, in looking for a
more tourism-sensitive definition/concept of innovation, tourism research has actually ended up by
diverging more substantially from the economic analysis of innovation in some key conceptual
requisites, which should however invariably apply also to its more specific declinations.

Classifying and reclassifying tourism innovation

The opportunity of departing from the Schumpeterian tradition has also been claimed by tourism
studies in front of the typologies of innovation that its original and extended definitions (see ‘From
innovation to tourism innovation, . . . and back to innovation’ section) have led to identify. First of
all, the standard four categories of the Oslo Manual (in its latest edition) – that is, product, process,
organizational and marketing innovations – have been re-elaborated in order to adapt to the
specificities of tourism (Hjalager, 2010). The most substantial re-elaboration has concerned the
category of process innovations, which has been basically ‘reduced’ to the adoption of externally
developed information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the different subsectors of the
industry, lodging (e.g. hotels and restaurants) and transports (e.g. airports) in particular (Rodgers,
2007; Sheller and Urry, 2006). More in general, given the experience-based nature of most product
tourism innovations – one might think of the low-cost ‘formulas’, recently introduced in the hotel
sector, by reconfiguring the balance between the main tourists’ experience dimensions
6 Tourism Economics XX(X)

(‘accessibility’, ‘affection’, ‘convenience’ and ‘value’) – process innovations have become the
equivalent of technological innovations, which would be hardly identifiable in other spheres of the
innovation process (Omerzel, 2016). A certain readaptation has also concerned the two standard
categories of non-technological innovations of the Oslo Manual, whose functional boundaries have
been either reduced – organizational innovations in tourism would be mainly limited to ‘man-
agerial innovations’, in the way the workforce is administered and motivated (Hjalager, 2010) – or
expanded – in the tourism sector, marketing innovations are claimed to be part of wider ‘man-
agement innovations’, which would include changes in the organizational policies and culture of
the providers (Vila et al., 2012).
A second methodological choice of tourism research has been that of adding to the four standard
categories of (manufacturing) innovation some additional ones, which could capture its unfolding
in alternative domains (Weiermair, 2006). A first addition has occurred in parallel to that recently
experienced by the literature on manufacturing and service innovations, and concerns the concept
and modes of eco-innovation (Marzucchi and Montresor, 2017), which however encompasses,
rather than alternating, the four original categories (in particular, product and process innovations).
The increasing importance of environmental sustainability has actually stimulated the interest for
those innovations through which the environmental impact of tourism firms and destinations can
be alleviated (e.g. Hall, 2008; Bell and Ruhanen, 2016; Liu et al., 2017; Martı́nez-Pérez et al.,
2015). A more specific addition is that of ‘institutional innovations’ (Hjalager, 2010: 3). In their
variegated manifestations (e.g. Van Wijk et al., 2015), these are intended to capture a wide
category of changes occurring in both the collaborative/organizational structures through which
tourism players interact (e.g. their networking) – an aspect to which the standard definition of
organizational innovation already refers to, in terms of ‘external relationships’ – and in the legal
and regulatory framework within which they operate (e.g. franchising and licensing arrangements)
– referring to cases of institutional change that however have wider implications than on the
tourism sector.
The search for alternative and/or new classifications, with a superior interpretative power than
the existing ones, does not represent per se a substantial divergence with respect to the broader
analysis of innovation in manufacturing and services, where a similar effort has been made since
long. One just needs to recall the notable distinctions between ‘architectural’ and ‘modular’
innovations in the technology/manufacturing domain (Henderson and Clark, 1990), or that
between ‘competence destroying’ and ‘competence enhancing’ ones (Anderson and Tushman,
1990). What is more diverging is the way the work of reclassification has been done in tourism
research. First of all, unlike in ‘mainstream’ innovation studies, the re-elaborated versions of the
existing categories as well as the new ones have not been crystallized yet into distinguishing
definitions, which could help to draw the boundaries, at least in principle and conceptual terms,
between themselves – let us think of the partial overlapping between managerial and management
innovations – and between them and standard innovation categories – the substantial overlapping
between the ‘new’ institutional and the ‘old’ organizational innovations is a case in point. As
innovation studies have shown, such a definitional effort is either prodromal to the attempt at
measuring specific innovations – let us think of the relationship between the Schumpeter theory of
innovation and the Oslo Manual – or posthumous to their empirical detection and investigation –
like in the case of the latest typologies of technological innovations we have recalled above. One
way or the other, defining innovation categories/typologies is essential to investigate their actual
reproducibility and diffusion and, what is more, their actual relevance. This is an additional ele-
ment of divergence of the research on tourism innovation, which at least so far has mainly used the
Montresor 7

new proposed categories as a sort of ‘shopping-list’ of innovation in tourism, without engaging in

the systematic search of their diffusion and of their eventual distinguishing impact. In innovation
studies, this is actually the main raison d’être of different innovation types, whose differential
impact has been searched and found in several respects – let us think of the differential impact of
product and process innovation on productivity (Hall, 2011) and on job creation/destruction
(Bogliacino and Pianta, 2010).
A second divergent choice in terms of innovation typologies in tourism refers to their mutual
relationships. In the majority of the studies that engage in their proposal and/or analysis, the point
emerges soon about their pervasive co-occurrence. Like in other services, and possibly to a greater
extent, in the tourism sector different categories of innovation occur simultaneously and interplay
between them (Weiermair, 2006). Just to make an example, process innovations (ICT adoption)
and marketing innovations have been shown to interact cumulatively in the airlines sector (Buhalis,
2004). Their interplay is pervasive also in other sectors and ‘certainly lead[s] to the breakdown of
borders between categories’ (Hjalager, 2010: 4), making them possibly more ‘fuzzy’ than in
services in general (Gallouj and Weinstein, 1997). This is actually the main implication of
innovation typologies to which tourism research has paid attention so far. In the experience-based
literature, for example, both consumer-based tourism innovations (Volo, 2006) and experience-
concept innovations (Eide and Mossberg, 2013) have been characterized as bundles of innovation
typologies (product, process, organizational and market), whose individual role and mutual rela-
tionships are retained unrecognizable. In the measurement of tourism innovation, even the most
basic innovation typologies (i.e. product vs. process innovations) have emerged hard to be dis-
entangled by survey respondents, and the proposal has been accordingly made to avoid their use
(Nordli, 2017). This concern is for sure motivated. On the other hand, its exclusive consideration
represents a further step away from the innovation literature, which has also paid attention to the
fluid boundaries between innovation typologies since long (on that between product and process
innovation, see e.g. Simonetti et al., 1995). While recognizing the importance of the issue,
innovation studies have however also tried to investigate the extent to, and the modalities through
which, different categories of innovation interact between them, especially technological with non-
technological ones. The streams of research on the so-called ‘complex innovators’ (Evangelista
and Vezzani, 2010) and on the complementarities across innovation types (Carboni and Russu,
2018) represent two notable instances of such an effort, which has found only limited corre-
spondence in tourism (and service) innovation so far (see, e.g. Guisado-González et al., 2014).
As it emerged in dealing with the conceptualization of innovation (see ‘From innovation to
tourism innovation, . . . and back to innovation’ section), also with respect to its classification,
tourism research seems to have gone beyond a justifiable effort of differentiation. Not only are the
identified typologies different and/or rearranged with respect to the standard ones of innovation
studies. But their identification has been pursued by diverging from them in some important
methodological respects – that is, boundaries definition, relevance and impact and mutual rela-
tionships – which would be arguably possible and opportune to converge with.

Determinants and effects of tourism innovation: Taking innovation theories seriously

In parallel with the research progress on the conceptualization/classification of tourism innova-
tions, an appreciable effort has also been put in the search of their determinants and in the analysis
of their effects. The attention to these issues detected by Hjalager’s (2010) review has continued
over time (Omerzel, 2016) and is visible also in the latest studies on the topic (e.g. Grissemann
8 Tourism Economics XX(X)

et al., 2013; Naidu et al., 2014). A certain continuity can also be found in the theoretical foun-
dations that have been driving such an analysis, which have remained weakly developed and, using
Hjalager’s (2010: 4) words, mainly ‘implicit’. As we will argue in the following, this represents a
further element of divergence from innovation studies, which is in turn due to an only partial kind
of reference to their theoretical contents.
At the outset, referring to the innovation literature for the theories at stake appears for tourism
scholars nearly inevitable. In spite of the substantial work undertaken – especially in the analysis of
experienced-based kinds of innovation – tourism innovation still lacks of a coherent body of
autonomous theoretical insights, which could account for its specific drivers and impacts with
respect to manufacturing and service innovation in general. A theoretical foundation similar to that
through which the economics of service has been able to differentiate its innovation analysis from
that of manufacturing (Gallouj and Savona, 2009) is actually still missing. On the other hand, the
reference of tourism research to ‘standard’ innovation theories has been mainly functional to the
‘simple’ identification of candidate explanatory factors – for example, the driving role of ICT, as
from the ‘technology-push’ approach (e.g. Naidu et al., 2014) – and plausible impact domains of
tourism innovation – for example, the competitiveness impact of tourism, as from the resource
competence-based view of the firm (e.g. Grissemann et al., 2013). The deeper implications of these
theories for the mechanisms through which tourism innovations are driven and exert their eco-
nomic impact have been instead only superficially addressed.
As far as the determinants are concerned, their analysis has been carried out by drawing
eclectically on different theoretical domains, which represent quite consolidated streams of
innovation literature, that is (i) innovative entrepreneurship, (ii) the technology push/demand pull
debate, (iii) organizational (competence and resource-based) knowledge, (iv) research-based
knowledge, (v) localized knowledge and (vi) innovation systems (this is the picture recon-
structed by Hjalager, 2010). However, in the majority of the cases, the link has been limited to the
front topic of each stream, without searching for more specific connections. Some examples could
help to detect this point, at a progressively more aggregated level of analysis. To start with, the
pivotal role that the ‘lifestyle entrepreneur’ plays in tourism innovation (Ateljevic and Doorne,
2000) could be more extensively disentangled by linking its analysis to the literature on the
relationship between entrepreneurial features (e.g. age, gender, family status, etc.) and innovation
(Nightingale and Coad, 2014). As for organizational knowledge, the increasing attention that
tourism research has been paid to the firm’s absorptive capacity and to external knowledge
acquisition (e.g. Martı́nez-Pérez et al., 2016; Thomas and Wood, 2014) could be enriched by
referring to the latest developments about the manifold nature of the same capacity (e.g. Franco
et al., 2014) and, above all, about the so-called ‘open innovation mode’ (Chesbrough, 2006). As for
localized knowledge and innovation systems (e.g. Carson et al., 2014), useful insights about the
unfolding of tourism innovation at specific destinations could be obtained by bridging its analysis
with that of innovation in economic geography, particularly in its evolutionary declination
(Boschma and Frenken, 2006).
The reference to innovation studies has been partial also in the investigation of the impact of
tourism innovation, which has been explored in different domains (e.g. financial performance,
quality standards, market sales, just to mention a few (Omerzel, 2016)), but with little theoretical
justification. This is for sure the case of its productivity impact (e.g. Blake et al., 2006; Torrent-
Sellens et al., 2016), so far addressed without encompassing the articulation of direct and indirect
effects that have been instead recognized with respect to manufacturing innovation, such as in the
famous CDM model by Crépon et al. (1998) (for a recent attempt to set tourism innovation in this
Montresor 9

framework, see Divisekera and Nguyen (2018)). The same holds true for the impact of tourism
innovation on the market value of firms (e.g. Nicolau and Santa-Maria, 2013), which would benefit
from a more integrated consideration of the analysis that innovation studies have made of how
financial markets value knowledge-intensive assets (Hall, 1999).
The limited extent to which the extant research has looked for the theoretical foundations of the
antecedents and consequences of tourism innovation is connected to another diverging aspect: the
differential attention innovation policy has found in tourism, as mainly prescriptive and with only
‘vague evidence of its effects and effectiveness’ (Hjalager, 2010: 8). If we exclude networking and
collaboration policies – which the small-medium-enterprises (SMEs) typical of the sector have
naturally induced to inspect (Novelli et al., 2006) – a mapping of the market and non-market
failures that require one rather than another policy intervention is in fact still missing (Halkier,
2014; Rodrı́guez et al., 2014). As a consequence of that, the literature still misses a conceptual
framework on the basis of which to look for the ‘additionality’ of tourism innovation policies.
Their evaluation is thus another important gap to be filled (Hall and Williams, 2008).
In conclusion, while tourism research has drawn on innovation studies in dealing with the
determinants and the effects of tourism innovation, a divergence remains in the way their analysis
has been grounded into sound theoretical foundations. The choice of making innovation theories
mainly functional to the identification of the candidate drivers and effects of tourism innovation,
and to refrain from developing more articulated hypotheses about their specific functioning,
represents another element of divergence, which would still be opportune to overcome.

The empirical analysis of tourism innovation and its ‘biases’

The most apparent terrain of divergence in the analysis of tourism innovation is for sure repre-
sented by the empirical methodologies through which evidence about them is collected and
investigated, especially about their determinants and economic impact. A first deviation concerns
the balance between qualitative and quantitative research. Although a dedicated survey of the
adopted empirical methodologies would be necessary and welcomed to accurately ascertain it, the
existing reviews of the literature and the latest contributions reveal that the relative weight of
qualitative methods (e.g. case studies, semi-structured in-depth interviews, ethnographic studies
and the like) over quantitative ones (i.e. statistical and econometric analyses based on primary or
secondary data) is substantially larger in tourism than in innovation studies. In the first decade of
tourism innovation research, covered by Hjalager’s (2010) review, the reference to piecemeal case
studies has been possibly motivated by the need of identifying, inductively as well as deductively,
the distinguishing features of a still unexplored phenomenon. For similar reasons, the use of in-
depth qualitative methodologies has also been crucial for the take-off of innovation studies in
general (Martin, 2016). On the other hand, while consolidating its theoretical premises, the
innovation literature has also progressively moved towards a systematic quantification of the
innovation processes. In so doing, it has equipped with specific measurement methodologies and
analytical tools to ascertain their actual consistence, determinants and impacts, and to draw reliable
predictions as well as policy/strategic recommendations. Conversely, while detectable to a certain
extent, the effort of tourism research in the same direction has been less intense. According to the
most recent review of the literature by Omerzel (2016), the relative incidence of quantitative over
qualitative studies appears to have grown over time (more than 45% of the 182 papers of his survey
are characterized as quantitative). Still, the search for a general and generalizable kind of evidence
about tourism innovation appears less a priority than in innovation studies, which do not appear a
10 Tourism Economics XX(X)

benchmark in this last respect either. Such an element of divergence is partially explained by the
lack of suitable ‘secondary’ data (e.g. by international organizations, like the EC, the UN and the
World Bank) for a systematic measurement and investigation of tourism innovation. Indeed, their
collection is still inspired by theoretical approaches that mainly fit with the Schumpeterian
paradigm of manufacturing innovation and leave much of tourism (and service) innovation
‘hidden’ (Camisón and Monfort-Mir, 2012). However, an important part of the deviation at stake
does not seem driven by data constraints and apparently responds to a choice of camp. First of all,
in spite of their bias/focus, existing international datasets on innovation do already contain
information on tourism firms/sectors (e.g. some releases of the CIS and of the EC Innobarometer),
which could be exploited more intensively at least to investigate the ‘non-hidden’ part of their
innovations (i.e. of technological, organizational and marketing nature), and the same holds true
for some country-specific business data sets (e.g. the Business Longitudinal Database developed
by the Australian Bureau of Statistics). Second, the search for alternative measurement frame-
works, which could enable to bring this hidden innovation in surface, is still limited to some ‘local’
proposals (e.g. Nordli, 2017, with respect to Norway) and hesitates to involve international
organizations, which could take care of their codification into manuals and of their utilization.
Third, the collection of primary data on tourism innovation, in which several scholars have
engaged to remedy the limitations of secondary ones – another aspect in need of a dedicated
review– is often designed in such a way to reach an only limited level of sampling coverage
and representativeness of the reference population, thus hampering the achievement of
generalizable results.
The last consideration is connected to a second element of divergence in the use of empirical
methodologies, which refers to the ‘sophistication’ of the analytical tools adopted in quantitative
research on tourism innovation. Once again, a survey about these methodologies would be
desirable to support more strongly what emerges from a general appreciation of the econometric
analysis of tourism innovation. Econometric strategies are generally aimed at detecting correla-
tions among focal variables, rather than proper causality relationships between them, either in
terms of antecedents or effects, on which innovation studies are instead focusing increasingly
more. In this case too, the lack of proper data is partially responsible for the divergence at stake.
The implications that a more intensive use of primary versus secondary sources has for the limited
availability of longitudinal data are for sure one of the most remarkable motivations (an interesting
exception to this pattern is the recent longitudinal study by Divisekera and Nguyen (2018)). On the
other hand, another choice of camp with respect to innovation studies seems to emerge from the
still limited resort of the research on tourism innovation to the analytical instruments through
which the ‘spurious’ nature of the investigated relationships – again, of both innovation causes and
effects – is addressed. Indeed, a number of these tools are amenable to be used also in a cross-
sectional environment (one just needs to think of variable instrumentation or selection and
simultaneous equations), and could definitively help in getting closer to more solid empirical
relationships.
All in all, while the available measurement methodologies and the kind of data collected
through them provide an important justification to the differentiation of the empirical research
between general innovation and tourism innovation, part of this differentiation seems to result from
another set of diverging choices, which add to the previous ones and to whose implications we will
turn in the next conclusive section.
Montresor 11

The risks of diverging (and converging) and the opportunity of

synthesizing tourism and innovation studies
The set of choices illustrated in the previous section reveals a body of research that, in recognizing
the need of differentiating tourism innovation from innovation elsewhere, and in proposing a more
fitting investigation of its distinguishing features, has departed substantially from some core
elements of innovation analysis. In brief, the divergence can be summarized in the following four
points:

 The definitions and conceptualizations of tourism innovation have ended up with having
weak reference to the degree of novelty and economic relevance that are required for a
change to be considered actual innovation.
 The reclassification of innovation typologies in tourism has occurred with a limited atten-
tion to the conceptual boundaries and to the empirical heterogeneity of the newly proposed
categories, thus hampering the development of a viable innovation taxonomy.
 In investigating drivers and effects of tourism innovation, innovation theories have been
mainly used superficially and this has hampered the development of grounded hypotheses
about their typical unfolding.
 The research on tourism innovation has only partially solved its initial bias towards quali-
tative and ‘unsophisticated’ empirical methodologies, which have so far hampered the
obtainment of systematic evidence and reliable strategic/policy implications.

As we said, a differentiated analysis appears necessary to avoid the risks of applying to tourism
the ‘subordination/assimilation’ approach, which has characterized the first wave of studies on
service innovation with respect to manufacturing (Coombs and Miles, 2000). Following a tech-
nology and manufacturing-based logic, and sticking to its measurement (Schumpeterian) meth-
odologies, would actually ‘hide’ some tourism-specific kinds of innovation (Camisón and
Monfort-Mil, 2012). Furthermore, the same would occur by following a generic service-based
logic, which assimilates tourism to service innovation (Volo, 2006).
On the other hand, a differentiation that arrives to affect the basic pillars of innovation analysis,
and that in so doing ‘diverges’ from the literature that has contributed to their construction, does
also entail a risk. The research efforts for taking tourism innovation out of the ‘dark’ could
paradoxically become ‘hidden’ to the scientific community engaged in innovation studies as well
as to the communities of practitioners involved in the implementation of the relative policy and
strategic implications. Putting it differently, the risk emerges that the research on tourism inno-
vation characterizes for adding knowledge to the understanding of tourism, but without simulta-
neously augmenting the comprehension of innovation. As a more practical consequence, tourism
innovation runs the risk of not being recognized relevant for the progress of innovation research,
not only by innovation scholars, but by tourism scholars too. The pattern of publications and
submissions to in- and out-of-the-field journals that we have documented in the Introduction is a
clear evidence of such a risk.
In order to avoid the previous risks, a more ‘convergent’ approach in the analysis of tourism
innovation would be necessary, capable of implementing a ‘synthetic’ combination between
tourism and innovation studies. Such an approach could take stock of the evolution in the analysis
of service innovations and of its recent move to what Coombs and Miles (2000) have precisely
called a ‘synthetic’ approach to their analysis. Recognizing the risks of an ‘autonomy’ or
12 Tourism Economics XX(X)

‘demarcation’ approach, basically amounting to an excessive divergence from the way innovation
is conceptualized and measured in manufacturing, some recent studies have argued that services
and manufacturing do not oppose in terms of innovation and rather lay along a continuum
(Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988). In particular, while there are aspects of manufacturing innovation
that do not find correspondence in services, and which thus require a differentiated analysis, there
are features of the latter that are part of the former, and which instead demand a synthesis.
Although still under the dominance of a demarcation approach, in the latest years the synthesis
between service and manufacturing innovation has grown substantially. As a proxy of that, it could
be noticed that much of the debate on service innovations by now occurs out of service-dedicated
journals: for example, out of the 679 publications that Scopus (limited to business and economics)
reveals to contain innovation and services in the title from 2010 (the year of Hjalager’s review) up
to date (February 2018), as many as 532 (78%) have been published in journals that do not contain
the word service in their title. What is more, 166 (24%) of these publications have been hosted in
journals about science, research, technology and innovation, with appreciable numbers in the
innovation journals that we have previously detected as completely ‘free’ from tourism innova-
tions: 6 on Innovation: Management and Organization, 6 in Industry and Innovation and 15 in
Research Policy.
As a first attempt to reach a similar synthetic approach, the research on tourism innovation should
try to adopt a less diverging position, and progressively a converging one, to the key choices that we
have pointed out in the previous section. As we have tried to argue, the conceptualization and
classification of tourism innovation, the theoretical foundation of its drivers and effects, and its
empirical measurement and investigation, could all be differentiated with respect to their companions
in manufacturing and services, but without departing from those aspects that the innovation literature
has shown to characterize innovation invariably from its domains of application. With such a
‘respectful’ differentiation, a synthesis between tourism and innovation studies could be set at work,
and through its development the analysis of tourism innovation could simultaneously increase the
available knowledge about both tourism and innovation. Accordingly, the synthesis could help
attenuate the polarization that the research on tourism innovation is currently finding in tourism
journals and makes its analysis of interest also for innovation journals and scholars.
The prospected change is no doubt a consistent one, which possibly requires a sort of ‘structural
break’ in a stream of studies that have ‘consolidated’ the diverging line we have detected. A
‘virgin’ editorial location, which feels to newly embrace the considerations expressed in this
commentary and to encourage and welcome the synthetic research on tourism innovation that we
have put forward, could make its diffusion quite effective. An important opportunity emerges in
this last respect that Tourism Economics would like to consider to capture and exploit.

Acknowledgements
The author thanks Albert Assaf and Raffaele Scuderi for their precious comments on a previous version of this
commentary. Furthermore, he thanks Markus Perkmann, Editor-in-Chief of ‘Innovation: Organization and
Management’, Christoph Grimpe, Editor-in-Chief of ‘Industry and Innovation’ and Claire Harkin, Editorial
Assistant of ‘Research Policy’, for providing information about the relative number of submissions about
tourism innovation received by their respective journal platforms.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Montresor 13

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Sandro Montresor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1195-901X

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