Tourism and innovation: A literature review

It is merely evident that innovation is more in the ascendant not only in the practical field but also in theory. However, although innovation seems to be entirely discussed within different business fields, tourism -due to its “service” and “manpower” based nature-, is considered to be one of the relatively stepwise sectors. Thus, this study aims to review 235 articles indexed by SSCI, SCI, SCI-E, ESCI and SCOPUS between 1900-2019 in the context of tourism-innovation relationship. In this review, these articles are grouped under the five themes of Schumpeter (1934) as product innovation, process innovation, market innovation, input innovation and organizational innovation. Among these studies, while process innovation was found to be the most studied subject, product and service innovation was found to be the least studied subject. The most frequently used keyword was found to be innovation itself. Besides it was seen that sustainability in process innovation, perceptions of employees and managers in organizational innovation, business performance and customer satisfaction in service innovation, product development and business performance in product innovation are the most frequently used keywords all through the entire tourism literature. These findings highlight that innovation in tourism research is developing as it does in the manufacturing industry. This research might be considered as not only an opportunity for contemporary innovation executives to follow up the developments in the theory and update their practices in the sector but also an inspiration for the theorists to discover the gaps and the relatively disregarded niche areas and contribute to the future researches.