Knowledge transfer in the hotel industry and the ‘de-locking’ of Central and Eastern Europe

Since Hjalager’s (2002: 465) call for ‘repairing innovation defectiveness in tourism’, research on innovations in the tourism industry has gradually expanded in profile (Hall and Williams 2008; Williams and Shaw 2011). The same, although to a lesser extent, applies to knowledge transfer (KT) in tourism, which constitutes the key focus of this chapter and a critical component of what the topic of innovations encompasses. Important examples of the latter include the work of Cooper (2006) and Shaw and Williams (2009) who thereby give hope that the neglect of tourist firms in innovation studies deriving from the overall image of the industry as low-tech in nature (Hirsch-Kreinsen et al. 2006) is being steadily overcome.