Developing Touristic Destination - Innovation Performance Issues

Abstract

Tourism is one of the most developing branches of service sectors. The paper deals with a key area of a Central-Eastern-European country (Hungary) from the European perspective, i.e. tourism. Tourism provides a remarkable ratio of GDP, thus its importance is inevitable. Tourism destination management (TDM in further text) organisations are local building stones of this important branch. These organisations received remarkable development funds in the previous budget period. The aim was to turn tourism into a competitive and innovative branch. Quadruple helix model -approach to innovation systems provides the opportunity to include the fourth helix -the media-based civic society -into the innovation performance, thus its performance influences the efficacy of the given innovation system. The paper assumes that these TDM organisations, as media-based civil organisations, appear as enterprises that are responsible for touristic innovation performance. The research objective is to prove, or deny that these institutions are important workshops of innovation. A survey research was conducted. In the meantime, feedback was collected about the structure, comprehensiveness and the logical structure of the questionnaire. Cooperation characteristics, the correlations between the innovation performances, the factors generating innovation and the reason for innovation are presented. The results of the study can be used by the state-governed tourism management, the vocational organisations and the Hungarian Tourism Ltd. in the process of establishing the framework of calls, and operational models in order to make international comparisons (with other countries).

Management of the Tourist Region - Identification of the determinants of Innovation

“…The environment of highly specialised external knowledge is made up of scientific and research institutions, also known as technology and knowledge transfer institutions and institutions supporting the flow of scientific and technical information. The first group of entities includes the academic environment, science and research institutions, science and technology parks, technology incubators, technology transfer centres, and an education system [34,35,36]. Institutions supporting information flow are comprised of consulting firms, training institutions [37], as well as study visits [38,39] and publications such as trade journals, specialised websites, publications.…”

“…The tasks of the institutional system and its role in supporting innovation of the tourism region involve implementing an appropriate innovation policy [15] by means of building flexible institutional support systems, including the development of appropriate innovation strategies [44,36,35], preparing a programme for the development of ICT infrastructure and supporting tourism enterprises in adapting and implementing new ICT [38,45] developing financial support programmes [46,36]. Innovative strategies should not only be limited to the tourism value chain, but also should support the building of cooperation between tourism companies, knowledge and information transfer institutions, and social organisations as well as other entities operating in the region [38,44,36,35]. Numerous studies point to the high impact of cooperation in the field of innovation in the tourism region between all stakeholder groups (e.g.…”

“…Other positive impacts of cooperation on the region's innovation include a free flow of knowledge and experience, as well as the minimisation of barriers such as insufficient financial, personnel, or infrastructure resources when implementing innovative activities [47,48,35]. The analysis of the literature on innovation research indicates that some research concerns the factors of innovation in enterprises [i.a 23,29,36,42], while the hotel industry is studied in most [i.a 4, 25, 37, 40,44]. There are extensive studies in the literature on the impact of individual factors influencing the innovativeness of enterprises, including the impact of cooperation and belonging to clusters on the innovativeness of enterprises [13,14,16,17,18,19,20,43,47], the importance of tasks carried out as part of cooperation [35], and the positive effects resulting from cooperation and belonging to clusters [35 , 47, 48].…”

“…A small number of publications analyse the impact of the institutional system and its role in supporting business innovation. Individual studies indicate that local governments should build flexible systems of institutional support, including innovation strategies [44,36,35], financial support programmes [46,36], and diverse forms of cooperation [38,44,36,35]. The analysis of the literature allowed for the diagnosis of the research gap.…”

Local Tourism, Social Innovations

“…The creation of innovative communities is formulated at the highest European levels and member countries adapt their regulation systems thereto. The acceptance and the need for novelty is a defining facto in the national economies, thus the development of the innovation ability of TDM organizations, as the main protagonists of tourism, is of special importance for the sake of the future of the entire branch (Máhr, 2017).…”