Tourism is perceived as an appropriate solution for pursuing sustainable economic growth due to its main characteristics. In the context of sustainable tourism, gamification can act as an interface between tourists (clients), organisations (companies, NGOs, public institutions) and community, an interface built in a responsible and ethical way. The main objective of this study is to identify gamification techniques and applications used by organisations in the hospitality and tourism industry to improve their sustainable activities. The first part of the paper examines the relationship between gamification and sustainability, highlighting the links between these two concepts. The second part identifies success stories of gamification applied in hospitality and tourism and reviews gamification benefits by analysing the relationship between tourism organisations and three main tourism stakeholders: tourists, tourism employees and local community. The analysis is made in connection with the main pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental. This study is positioning the role of gamification in the tourism and hospitality industry and further, into the larger context of sustainable development.

Industrial networks and clusters have proven to be driving forces for fueling businesses with innovations, advanced research and for accelerating the entry of products and services into the market. The most important successful factors for their development are intensive collaboration, spread at global level and sustainable innovation. In this context, technology will play the most important role in enhancing these aspects. Consequently, the communications tools will transform the way of managing and organizing the entire activities inside groups of companies/institutions. The main goal of this paper is to explore how the communication process in networks and clusters can be improved and innovated based on an analysis of different examples of tools developed and implemented in the case of a cluster initiative in life sciences. This case study reveals different approaches of social media tools used for networking propose which can be adopted by other networks and clusters interested in innovation and know-how exchange.

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