Innovation in the tourism industry: The case of Tourism@

The objective of the paper is to apprehend and capture the evolution of innovative activities in the tourism industry through the empirical analysis of annual Tourism@ events. Tourism@ is an important trade fair in Europe that brings together major actors related to the tourism industry, i.e.: innovative start up companies, high tech small and medium sized enterprises, large multinationals and academics. The event provides significant information on innovation in the tourism industry through a competition for the best projects awarding either new technologies or new uses of ICT applied to tourism. The database of technological innovative projects gathered during the competitions is exploited and examined in a Sectoral System of Innovation and Production framework. Three main attributes of the framework are used for the analysis of the industry: knowledge bases, actors and demand. The paper highlights the intensity of innovation activity in tourism, and gives evidence about the rapid evolution of the tourism industry as well as the substantial impact of ICT on this evolution. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.