Measuring innovation in tourism with Community Innovation Survey: a first step towards a more valid innovation instruments.

Abstract

Researchers require more innovation surveys in tourism, but have pointed out the deficient quantitative instruments used to measure this innovation. They have questioned whether hidden innovation may explain the low innovation rates in the tourism industry. Two tourism surveys have been conducted in Norway recently. One uses the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) to measure innovation and the other a modified CIS instrument. The surveys produce quite different results. The CIS survey shows low innovation rates and the modified survey shows high innovation rates, which highlights the need for more research on the use of the CIS in tourism research. The purpose of this study is to explore and identify how the CIS can be improved and be a more valid instrument for measuring innovation in tourism. Senior managers and department managers from different tourism businesses were interviewed after having completed the CIS survey. The findings indicate that the CIS is too concerned with R&D and technology, and does not capture important innovation in relation to service characteristics. In addition, the terminology and the categorization of four innovation types might distract and confuse the respondents. Furthermore, the survey lacks procedures for capturing all innovations developed at the departmental level within the companies. Thus, the findings indicate that parts of significant innovation are hidden. The article contributes with several suggestions regarding how the CIS can be improved in a more integrative direction, and concludes that the CIS should not be dismissed as an instrument for measuring innovation, but rather should be improved. ARTICLE HISTORY

20 years of Nordic tourism economics research: a review and future research agenda

“…A good example of the studies based on such data is the analysis of domestic tourism demand of households using the Swedish travel and tourism survey (Coenen & van Eekeren, 2003). In addition, data collected and processed by the national statistical offices like the community innovation survey (CIS) partly cover tourism firms and ahttps://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2020.1779806e increasingly used (Nordli, 2017(Nordli, , 2018.…”

Disruptive network innovation in free guided tours

“…Together with Kwiatkowski and Østervig Larsen, she pointed at five innovation gaps in Scandinavian tourism in 2017, among them the knowledge gap. Since 2016, Jørgensen Nordli (2016Nordli ( , 2017 has pointed both at the probability for tourism firms to innovate if they use cross-functional work teams, but also that parts of tourism innovation are actually hidden, due to their partial invisibility. Christensen's (1997) concept of disruptive innovations describes a process in which new phenomena completely transform a market by offering distinct sets of benefits, e.g.…”

Innovation in tourism

“…For example, Camisón and Monfort-Mir (2012) have suggested that innovation in tourism should refer to the ‘capacity’ to change – that is, the ‘dynamic capabilities’ through which firms learn to face change (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000) – rather than to the outcome/performance of the same capacity, to which the Schumpeterian approach instead alludes. Along a similar vein, Nordli (2017) proposes to look for tourism innovation in the process of value co-creation – with suppliers and customers – that typically constitutes the ‘service logic’ (Grönroos and Voima, 2013). Keeping the focus on innovation as output/performance, a new conceptualization of it has been proposed by looking at tourism through the lens of the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).…”