Abstract

MARTINS AIRES, Jussara Danielle  and  AMORIM VARUM, Celeste. The Research on Measurement of Innovation in Tourism Companies: Literature Review.. Estud. perspect. tur. [online]. 2018, vol.27, n.1, pp.102-120. ISSN 1851-1732.

Innovation is universally recognised as a decisive factor in corporate competitiveness. There is, however, less consensus with regards to how innovation should be measured, especially in the service sector and mainly in services as complex as tourism. Therefore, in this paper, a systematic literature review is carried out with the purpose of showing how the academic literature has positioned itself with regards to measuring innovation in that sector. The analysis is based on selecting and targeting relevant articles published in journals indexed in the SCOPUS database. It highlights the limited number of contexts in which the topic has been empirically analysed, meaning that the results obtained are insufficient for generalization. The analysis also identifies the prevalence of the convergent approach, which uses innovation-related theories, models and measurement methods from traditional sectors adapting them to the tourism sector. At the same time, it observes that a minority of cases are guided by a divergent approach - one which treats tourism as a phenomenon with its own specificities, where research is partially or totally based on insights and instruments specifically developed for the industry. In addition, it identifies a lack of consistency and standardization in the methods used to measure innovation in tourism. The analysis concludes that there is a need for developing tools that take into account the identity and specificities of all the branches within the sector as well as the validation and application of those tools in different contexts.

Keywords : Innovation research; Innovation measurement; Innovation in tourism; Tourism enterprises; Literature review.