Building and Managing Strategic Destination Innovation Networks in Irish SMEs

The aim of this research project is to broaden the scope of innovation theory and enterprise practice by incorporating a strategic focus on the dynamic capabilities critical for the establishing, developing and managing a destination innovation network and how firms should integrate, build and reconfigure their skills, resources and functional competencies for its creation. The study centralises the dynamic capabilities of SMEs in order to understand how to create and manage the network for enhanced innovation – a subject area of major complexity which few researchers have undertaken.  The ultimate aim of the research is to present a pragmatic (‘how-to’) model on the development and management of a destination network and in so doing, will obtain implementable guidelines that can be used by Irish SMEs to gain competitive advantage through continuous innovation.