Guest editorial

Citation

Morvillo, A., Marasco, A., De Martino, M. and Hon, A.H.Y. (2018), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 30 No. 6, pp. 2362-2363. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-06-2018-810

Collaborative innovation in hospitality and tourism

Welcome to IJCHM’s special issue on collaborative innovation in hospitality and tourism. I would like to pay special thanks to our guest editors Alfonso Morvillo, Alessandra Marasco, Marcella De Martino and Alice Hon for putting together this very strong and timely special issue. The articles included in this special issue should be well received by scholars, students and practicing managers in our field.

Fevzi Okumus

Editor-in-Chief

It is widely recognized that collaboration can be an important source of innovation, sustainability and competitive advantage. The fervor around collaborative models of innovation is spreading across industries, including the hospitality and tourism industry, where fierce competition makes collaborative marketing and innovation an essential condition for survival for firms and destinations. Collaborative approaches are particularly important in these sectors, given the range and diversity of actors involved in the management, marketing and innovation of tourism products and destinations. However, collaborative innovation is not a successful approach in itself, given the challenges involved in the pursuit of innovations across firms’ boundaries through the collaboration with various stakeholders. In this regard, more research is needed in this area to advance the current knowledge of how tourism and hospitality firms can face these challenges and manage collaboration for innovation for sustaining their competitive advantage. In response, this special issue sought studies that apply wider theoretical lenses and rigor methodologies to improve our understanding of this phenomenon in hospitality and tourism.

Our special issue covers a wide range of topics related to collaborative innovation. These include, for example, dynamic capabilities enabling successful collaborative innovation, communication processes between stakeholders in an open innovation platform, network orchestration in collaborative innovation settings, the role of external knowledge sources and intra-organizational collaboration as determinants of innovation. The broad spectrum of research topics addressed by articles in this special issue reflects the complexity of collaborative innovation in the hospitality and tourism field. Further, the special issue addresses collaborative innovation at different levels (organization, destination, network, cluster and multi-level) and in relation to diverse contexts in tourism and hospitality, including hotel industry, heritage and festivals. Finally, it presents a global geographical coverage, with studies focusing on locations in Europe (Austria, Spain, Sweden and the UK), Asia (South Korea), Africa (Ghana) and the USA (North-America), and a diversity of qualitative and quantitative methods, including case studies, interviews, content analysis and surveys.

Alessandra Marasco, Marcella De Martino, Fabio Magnotti and Alfonso Morvillo provide a synthesis of the state of research on collaborative innovation in hospitality and tourism. Philip Alford and Yanqing Duan investigate the key factors affecting collaborative innovation in a destination management organization from a dynamic capability perspective. Namhyun Kim and Changsup Shim address the relationship among social capital, knowledge sharing, innovation and performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises in a tourism cluster. Dioni Elche, Pedro M. García-Villaverde and Angela Martínez-Pérez analyze the effects of inter-organizational relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation in heritage tourism clusters at UNESCO World Heritage Cities in Spain. Raymond Adongo and Seongseop Kim examine the extent of collaboration and networking between local festival stakeholders by focusing on the different views of collaboration and networking among stakeholders.

Wajda Wikhamn, John Armbrecht and Björn Remneland Wikhamn investigate how structural and organizational factors influence hotel’s likelihood of producing service/product, process, organizational and marketing innovations. Peter Schofield, Phil Crowther, Leo Jago, John Heeley and Scott Taylor contribute to theory concerning collaborative innovation through stakeholder engagement with reference to Glasgow City Marketing Bureau’s (GCMB) management strategies. Lidija Lalicic examines the communication processes between stakeholders who discuss, reach consensus and engage with user-generated ideas through an open innovation platform facilitated by destination management organization. Julia Nieves and Gonzalo Diaz-Meneses identify the role played by external knowledge sources and intra-organizational collaboration as determinants of innovation in hotel firms. They propose that local knowledge sources and intra-organizational collaboration determine the probability of producing incremental innovations, and that non-local knowledge sources determine the introduction of radical innovations. Finally, Pauline Milwood and Wesley Roehl elucidate the extent to which the theoretical framework of network orchestration can explain the system of relations underlying roles and behaviors of tourism actors in collaborative innovation settings.

We hope that this special issue can help stimulate further interest and research in this field. We greatly thank all authors and referees for their contributions.