Creating a Living Lab Model for Tourism and Hospitality Businesses to Stimulate CSR and Sustainability Innovations

Abstract

Living Lab is a user centred open-innovation research concept and environment that integrates concurrent research and innovation processes. The innovation capacity of living labs is discussed in academia mainly in sectors like Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Smart Cities, and Social Innovation. In travel and tourism, living labs so far are analysed in regard to destination management to boost the attractiveness of rural areas and agri-tourism activities in countries like Bulgaria and Canada. This paper aims to apply the living labs method in the context of sustainable and responsible tourism. Therefore this study concentrates on model creation, mainly of living labs in tourism in general, and then zooms in to the application of living labs in the particular case of a leisure resort and hotel. By visualizing different models of living lab implementation, these findings can contribute to a pragmatic approach to promote the understanding of the living lab environment and its methodology and the elegant implementation of living labs in general. Two key elements of living labs in the hospitality business, firstly the embedded CSR supply chain for co-creation and partner involvement and secondly engaging hotel guests in user involvement, will be highlighted in order to show the potential and capability of living lab development for creating and maintaining sustainable tourism innovations.Sustainable Development and Planning X 575 process. This model is enhanced by adding key actors of the entire tourism sector and the network partners.The realm of environment and methodology, which are essential for the tourism living lab and its actors are embedded in the above model and described hereinafter.  Users: Playing a key role as co-creators of the products, services and technologies being developed. Consideration of users' natural environment as tourists and in their daily routines. Involving ethnographic observation, empathy, and rapid real-life prototyping.  Environment: Ecosystem of stakeholders who can interact to develop and assess products, services and processes, or systems. The physical or geographical region for in-situ approach. Socio-political and applications environment for the contextdriven approach. Milieu.  Technology and Infrastructure: New or adjusted technologies to deliver benefits to users on all levels, e.g. facilitators and organisations, researchers, end-users. Set-up the base in the infrastructure to share opinions, knowledge and values, e.g. social media platforms, classic ICT. Provide hard-and software.  Organisation and Methods: Action research, real-life setting, interaction of theory and practice. SMART goal setting and using key principles such as openness -on voluntary basis -to empower people, realism, comprising meetings and interviews with focus groups, in easily accessible places, and empowerment of users through participation, facilitating involvement, thus influencing key deliverables.  Suppliers I: Mostly governmental or monopolistic providers: Water, Electricity...

“Agro”, “Agri”, or “Rural”: The Different Viewpoints of Tourism Research Combined with Sustainability and Sustainable Development

“…Even though the most important issues of themes/sub-themes-supply, demand, residents, policy, qualitative and quantitative methods-are not presented analytically in this paper, our preliminary findings indicate that they are explored mainly on qualitative grounds, from the supply side (related to the types of farms, the services and products offered [114] (p. 164)) and with limited concern about policy implications/recommendations. These findings are in line with Yang et al (2010) [30], pointing to the need to compare more cases, both geographically (a few examples are the references [63,76,112,[118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125]) and in scale (micro and macro level, locally and globally), from the supply and the demand side, with different stakeholders/actors (including residents, such as reference [126]), which, in turn, might lead to an improved theoretical and practical understanding of these types of development (sustainable and local). With regard to the combination and in-depth analysis of the three dimensions of sustainable development, economy, society, and environment, what emerges is that, thus far, authors have mainly adopted mono perspectives in their studies and multidisciplinary approaches are much less embraced, as also shown by Ammirato et al (2020) [12].…”

Creating shared value through open innovation approaches: Opportunities and challenges for corporate sustainability

“…The research questions of the extracted contributions (that are reported in Table 2) indicated that in many cases, companies are striving in their endeavors to build productive relationships with different stakeholders (Mtapuri et al, 2022;Peña-Miranda et al, 2022;Shaikh & Randhawa, 2022), to create value to their businesses as well as to society (Döll et al, 2022;Ghodbane, 2019;Roszkowska-Menkes, 2018). Very often, they confirmed that open innovation practitioners are promoting organizational governance (Aakhus & Bzdak, 2015;Sánchez-Teba et al, 2021), fair labor practices (Chang, 2020;Herrera & de las Heras-Rosas, 2020;Kumar & Srivastava, 2020;Schmidt-Keilich & Schrader, 2019), environmentally responsible investments (Aakhus & Bzdak, 2015;Cigir, 2018;Mendes et al, 2021;van Lieshout et al, 2021;Yang & Roh, 2019), and consumer-related issues (Greco et al, 2022;Loučanová et al, 2022;Wu & Zhu, 2021;Yang & Roh, 2019), among other laudable behaviors.…”

“…The findings from this review reported that, for the time being, just a few researchers are integrating open innovation's cocreation approaches with corporate sustainability outcomes. A number of contributing authors insisted that there are many advantages for socially and environmentally responsible companies to embrace open innovation approaches (Carayannis et al, 2021; Cigir, 2018; Mendes et al, 2021; Yang & Roh, 2019). In many cases, they argued that the practitioners' intentions are to broaden their search activities and to avail themselves from talented employees and external experts in exchange for enhanced social legitimacy, thereby availing themselves of innovation capital for future enterprising activities (Greco et al, 2022; Holmes & Smart, 2009).…”

A Systematic Literature Review of Partnership Development at the University–Industry–Government Nexus

“…Economic development [1,8,10,57,76] Economic geography [75,96] Innovation theory [7,11,15,46,49,53,54,60,62,63,70,78,90,94,110,123,[133][134][135][136] Open innovation theory [3,[35][36][37]58,62,64,67,69,97,101,113,118,125,[137][138][139][140] Innovation management theory [100,114,132] User innovation theory [141,142] Collaborative knowledge production…”

“…In this SLR, living labs (and derivatives) are the partnership structure that is being used successfully to drive social and economic development [62,126]. It is also the structure that is used in the limited number of studies that are using innovation to drive the delivery of sustainable development [19,29,40,73,96,107,109,115,[127][128][129][130][131][132], with the emphasis on both sustainability labs and urban living labs. The literature does not provide guidance for the reasons for this.…”