Competence-based Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism

Dr Pechlaner and Dr Innerhofer, the editors of Competence-Based Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism, argue that the industry operates within highly challenging and competitive environments. Changing environmental and market conditions continually force hotel businesses and service providers to offer their customers new and modified products and services, in order to remain competitive; those which respect value perceptions of markets and sustainable stakeholder reactions. This then raises the question of how innovations within this industry must be developed in order to achieve competitive differentiation.

The book demonstrates that the development and analysis of successful innovation strategies should integrate the resource-based view and its advancements, the competence-based view, as well as the dynamic capabilities approach and the relational view. Resource-based strategic management approaches view the firm as a bundle of resources and competences. They point to the importance of firm-specific resources and competences in explaining variations in competitive positions and performance differentiation between companies. The challenge of hospitality and tourism is to develop resources and competences that drive innovations.

This book will serve to advance the status quo of tourism research literature by combining innovation theories with network theories and tourism and destination development, by illustrating the development of cooperative competences and innovations in tourism and by showing, in a tailored way, how the challenge of the development of resources and competences that drive innovations in tourism can be managed.

Dr Harald Pechlaner is the Professor and holder of the Chair of Tourism, Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany and Scientific Director of the Institute for Regional Development and Location Management at the European Academy of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. He is the assessor for a number of scientific journals and he is a Member of several boards such as the Editorial Advisory Board of Tourism and Hospitality. He has been published in many English journals.

Dr Elisa Innerhofer is a Senior researcher at the European Academy of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, in the Institute for Regional Development and Location Management. Her book entitled Strategic Innovation in the Hotel Industry was published by Springer, in German in July 2012.