In this article, we analyze the impact on hotels of the ISO 14001 environmental certification system from the customers’ perspective. Based on a comparison of customer ratings of 6,850 hotels in Spain with and without ISO 14001 certification, overall guests rate the hotels with ISO 14001 certification higher than those without the certification. These results are stronger for hotel comfort and hotel services compared with other hotel attributes. Moreover, the most significant differences were found in the upscale four-star hotels. While the study does not reveal causes for these findings, the implication is that the highest end five-star luxury hotels do not gain distinctive differentiation by having the ISO 14001 certification, while for three-star hotels, guests’ price sensitivity overrides environmental concerns. At the four-star level, however, hotels seem to be able to gain a distinct market advantage from environmental certification. For all hotels, the management discipline provided by ISO 14001 can provide a competitive advantage.

Article SummaryA five-year analysis of tourism clusters finds that hotels generally benefit from being part of a cluster of tourist-related businesses. However, not all clusters or hotels benefit to the same extent-or at all in some cases. The cluster effect is stronger for luxury and upscale hotels, and chain-managed hotels also seem to benefit more than their independent competitors. Clusters in resort and airport locations seem to confer lower benefits than those in small-metro areas and towns, urban, or suburban areas. These results support the concept that economies of agglomeration lead to benefits from being co-located with other tourism businesses. 557354C QXXXX10.1177/1938965514557354Cornell Hospitality QuarterlyPeiró-Signes et al. research-article2014Abstract A cluster is a geographical concentration of interrelated firms. Cluster theory states that the synergies created inside the cluster (by the interactions between firms that compete and those that collaborate) enhance the productivity and innovation of firms and therefore their economic performance. While manufacturing industries have been widely studied from the clustering perspective, service clusters and specifically touristic clusters have received less attention. In this paper, we identify U.S. touristic clusters using a concentration measure, the Location Quotient. Then we check whether hotels located in touristic clusters obtain higher economic results than those hotels located in areas where the level of touristicrelated business concentration does not get the critical mass to consider it a cluster (instead of reducing their benefits due to the high level of competitors nearby). Our results find significant differences between the two sets of hotels. The effect is stronger for subsegments of hotels based on their star category, location, and management structure. Specifically, we demonstrate that the differences are more pronounced within luxury and upscale hotel categories and within chainmanaged hotels. The differences are less important in resort and airport locations than in small-metro/town, urban, and suburban areas. These results have important location implications for managers. They also contribute to understanding that economies of agglomeration lead to benefits from being located closely and in highly concentrated industries. But there is still a lot of research needed to better understand the relations between cooperation and competition within touristic clusters and how these enhance the economic performance of hotels.

Innovation is not just an economic and or technological tool; it is also a social phenomenon. This paper draws together the concepts of creating shared value, the stakeholder theory, and socially oriented innovation to research companies' decisions on asserting socially related objectives when innovating. We examine the extent to which this decision process is bounded by constraints related to information and the characteristics of innovation. To perform this study we used a dataset that monitors the innovation activities of companies. This study offers an empirical analysis of the influence on firms' social innovation orientation. The empirical analysis supports the theoretical framework and identifies the firm's community links as key factors in developing new innovations, process and product-oriented, which have an impact on the social-innovation orientation of the firm. Additionally, it shows how the setting up of social goals when innovating is affected by the information source and the innovation mode being developed.There is a relationship between the creation process (represented by the product and process orientation) and the human-centered focus, represented by the social innovation construct, as highlighted by Brown and Wyatt (2010), confirming the first and second hypotheses.Specifically, the research findings show that the social innovation orientation within a company is influenced by two types of innovation-oriented activities: process-and product-oriented, and that the source of ideas for process and product innovation can be traced to information sources related to the firms' close environment, including clients and customers, their staff, and competitors and firms from the same industry, and the firm's local and close links. This explains how looking for the benefits of the close environment will also benefit the company and vice versa, as the main idea of the stakeholders theory claims (Freeman, 1984).This social innovation construct is based on six objectives: health, safety, employment, sustainability, growth, and environmental concerns (the model was tested on more than 5900 Spanish companies). Thus, it can be expected that firms looking for costs reduction on energy or waste consumption, process improvements, etc., might also be considering increasing or maintaining their market position and therefore their employment. Similarly, companies that search for new markets and products and aim to increase their market share are trying to maintain or increase their competitive position, and consequently their employment level.Moreover, the social-innovation model considers that the internal sources and the information from customers, competitors, consultants, commercial labs, and private R&D institutes are important drivers of both process and product orientation. It can be expected that other sources of information will have a relevant impact and elucidate companies' process and product orientation when innovating. On the other hand, the higher weightings in the model for sources such as customer...

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The environment is increasingly gaining importance for citizens and society and, therefore, for consumers. Eco‐innovation is a direct path for reducing the impact of production while providing companies with a source of competitive advantage. The automotive industry and its supply chain have a great impact on the environment, but no research has been developed on how the orientation toward the environment is evolving for the automotive industry and how future performance may be affected by current decisions. The aim of this paper is to bridge this gap by analyzing the eco‐innovative dynamism of the automobile industry. To do this, we use a panel analysis to see the point at which past behavior influences future decisions. The partial least square method is used to analyze the eco‐innovative dynamism of the automobile industry. We analyze a data set based on 159 responses of Spanish companies that belong to the automobile sector. Results show that environmental orientation drivers do not evolve over a short period while in the longer term there is an evolution. We prove that carryover effects have a great impact on the future behavior of the firms, showing that the evolution of organizations' environmental behavior is a long‐range consideration. Managerial implications arise from this paper's conclusions, as the decision‐making process is clarified.

Literature about sustainability and sustainable businesses has become a large field of study during the last years. This field is growing so fast that there are sub-areas or bodies of literature within the sustainability which scopes with clear boundaries between each other. This has caused the apparition of several methodologies and tools for turning traditional companies into sustainable business models. This paper aims to develop the descriptive stage of the theory building process through a careful review of literature to create the first phase of a theory about corporate sustainability. It provides the following classification of concepts retrieved from the observation of the state of art: holistic sustainability, sustainable business models, sustainable methodologies, sustainable operations, and sustainability-oriented innovation. In addition, it seeks to establish relationships between the sustainable concepts and the expected outcomes that their implementation can generate among companies and organizations. Finally, it gives an overview of possibilities for managers that want to embed sustainability in their firms and clear paths of research for keeping the building of the theory about corporate sustainability as a process of constant iteration and improvement.

The sun, sea and sand model that has characterized the Spanish tourism sector and has caused Spain's tourist sector to become a world-class industry is actually undergoing drastic changes. This model is based on the existence of major tourism destinations characterized by high levels of industry specialisation, which makes them a target of analysis as tourism clusters in which the geographic concentration of synergies reinforces the competitive position. In this study, Spanish tourism clusters are identified using quantitative methods and the current validity of the economies of location that have made them possible are also analysed. Although all the identified clusters can be defined as mature and became less significant during the last decade in Spanish tourism, according to the results the creation of externalities measured in terms of higher generation of profit is higher in companies belonging to the tourism clusters than in those outside of them.