'Assessing the Innovativeness of Tourism Firms and it’s Antecedents.'

One dominant theme that continuously appears to emerge from national reports is that in order for the tourism industry to surmount the detrimental effects of lost competitiveness, emphasis must be directed at enhancing the innovativeness of the tourism firm. Although innovation has been acknowledged in academia and government circles as a key success driver for the tourism industry and despite numerous calls to explore tourism innovativeness, few research agendas have addressed this issue, resulting in extensive knowledge gaps. Different from traditional innovation studies, this research takes the view that a firm’s long-term survival may rely more on overall firm-level innovativeness that produces capabilities, which in turn enhances innovative behaviour and less on the actual innovations themselves. Thus the proposed research will examine a new thematic area within the tourism literature by measuring firm-level innovativeness and the factors that shape it.

Since no prior research on firm-level innovativeness within the tourism industry has been conducted in Ireland, it is proposed to conduct a National study to examine the differences in firm innovativeness and the factors that facilitate these differences. Following this, case research of two firms, identified in the National study as examples of best practice, will be conducted. The expected outcome will be a diagnostic model that will allow firms to measure their level of innovativeness and identify which dimensions constrain innovative behaviour in their organisations, as well as for identifying and utilizing the most relevant mechanisms in order to upgrade their innovative mode. Indeed, it maybe found that low levels of innovativeness are prevalent within the tourism industry, which would have key policy implications for the use of the model for firm-level innovativeness developed in the current research.