ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter outlines a number of areas that are significant for the future of innovation and innovation research in a tourism context. One of the most important research themes is that tourism innovation cannot be well understood if it is only examined in the context of the firm and individual entrepreneurs, as significant as they might be. Instead, innovation also needs to be understood in its territorial context. This is apparent in both the innovation systems approaches as well as related concepts such as the ‘learning firm’, ‘learning economy’, the ‘learning region’, ‘creative economies’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘clusters’, ‘intelligent cities’, ‘smart specialisation’, ‘smart cities’ and ‘smart destinations’. A second major theme is the question of whether a firm has to innovate in order to survive. The chapter notes that this question needs to be approached in a more nuanced fashion as it depends on the nature of the firm and its business environment and where it is in its life course. Importantly, this also raises questions about the nature of so-called disruptive innovations and how they are regulated given that this affects the competitive environment within which innovations can succeed – or not. An additional issue is the need to better understand the business model of firms so that financial arrangements and innovations are also incorporated into any analysis. Finally, the chapter stresses the need for a more sophisticated analysis of tourism innovation than what is often the case and highlights the importance of seeing innovation as a multi-scaled phenomenon. Tourism’s relationship with innovation needs to be contextualised with national, regional, spatial, and sectoral innovation systems. The intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of service innovation also requires different research approaches compared to those that can be applied to many areas of manufacturing or product-oriented industries, that typically seek predictability and control in operations, as opposed to the variability that is part of many service offerings.
