Improving Tourism Innovation Performance: Linking Perspectives of Asset Specificity, Intellectual Capital, and Absorptive Capacity

Abstract

This study seeks to better understand the link of a tourism firm’s intellectual capital to innovation performance, empirically testing the mediating role of absorptive capacity and moderating effect of asset specificity. Findings from 217 Chinese tourism firms indicate that absorptive capacity plays a mediating role in the capital–performance link, and the effect of social capital to absorptive capacity is highest when asset specificity is at an intermediate level, having an inverted “U” shape. The result indicates that the effect of the human capital is “U” shape with asset specificity. Thus, the findings make a few new important insights to the tourism innovation literature and also offer a number of vital implications for tourism managerial practices.

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“…Lee et al, 2019). This capacity is particularly vital in hospitality and tourism, as enterprises’ innovation activities depend heavily on obtaining exploitative knowledge along with filtering, incorporating, or amalgamating current intellectual knowledge (Wu, 2020). Another important capacity relevant to innovation is collaborative ability.…”

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