Editorial: Entrepreneurship and innovation in tourism

              Vol. 7 Nº 3 págs. 355-357. 2009
www.pasosonline.org
© PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural. ISSN 1695-7121
Editoral
Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Tourism
Eduardo Parra Lopéz
Universidad de La Laguna (España)
Dimitrios Buhalis
Bournemouth University (UK)
Alan Fyall
Bournemouth University (UK)
Entrepreneurship and innovation are
critical factors in tourism and are both cen-tral
to the continued success and develop-ment
of the industry, both globally and
regionally. As evidenced in the text by Hall
and Williams (2008), entrepreneurship and
innovation can refer to a variety of con-cepts.
For example, they can refer to the
changes in the organisation of work, leisure
time and absolute and relative income dis-tribution
as can they refer to exogenous
sources of innovation such as technology.
Tourism can also drive innovation, either
through the behaviour of firms or through
deliberate policy making and interventions
from government while it can also drive
innovation through its involvement in key
sectors such as retailing. Interestingly,
however, academic articles on entrepre-neurship
and innovation in tourism are few
and far between. Although case studies on
both themes appear from time to time, em-pirical
studies remain limited while in
those papers that have reached publication,
in many, there remains a paucity of empiri-cal
rigour. As such, it is the view of the
three editors that entrepreneurship and
innovation in tourism remains an under-researched
area of investigation and, there-fore,
new critical insights of theoretical
frameworks, methodologies and sector-specific
studies are required if the field is
going to mature and ‘catch up’ other more
established areas of intellectual enquiry
such as tourism planning and marketing.
To start to redress the balance of this
vacuum of academic material, the broad
themes above serve as a catalyst for the
many papers in this issue with three specif-ic
sub-themes coming under research scru-tiny.
These can be summarized as: entre-preneurship
and entrepreneurial develop-ment;
market segmentation; and, innova-tion
and tourism development.
Under the theme of entrepreneurship
and entrepreneurial development, three
papers are presented. Set in the context of
the development of mass tourism in Medi-terranean
Spain and the Canary Islands in
the 1960s, the first paper by Fernández
explores the emergence of a new tourist
‘entrepreneur class’. Developing a histori-cal,
political and comparative perspective of
the conditions that helped to configure the
growth of the local tourist ‘entrepreneur
class’ the author uses the island of Majorca
356 Editorial: Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Tourism
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 7(3). 2009 ISSN 1695-7121
as the case setting, and reflects on how the
combination of the rapid growth in Euro-pean
tour operations and the Franco ad-ministration
served as the catalyst for the
development of such a phenomenon. The
second paper by Jonker, Saayman and De
Klerk focuses on the Klein Karoo National
Arts Festival (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn,
South Africa which is the largest festival of
its kind in the country. The purpose of this
study was to determine the attributes and
role of the entrepreneurs at the festival,
something that was achieved by means of a
questionnaire survey which generated 249
responses. After data capturing was com-pleted,
two factor analyses were conducted.
The first factor analysis revealed six factors
(entrepreneurial attributes), namely organ-isational
skills, resourcefulness, self-edification,
explorative, acquired skill and
drive, of which resourcefulness had the
highest mean value. The second factor
analysis identified the role of entrepre-neurs
at KKNK and revealed three primary
roles, namely festival promotion, product
promotion and income generation, of which
product promotion had the highest mean
value. Interestingly, this is first time that
the roles of entrepreneurs at festivals have
been investigated in South Africa. The
third paper in this theme, by Peters, Fre-hse
and Buhalis explores and discusses the
emergence of lifestyle entrepreneurship.
The paper addresses the question of the
relationship between the entrepreneur’s
quality of life and the growth of the enter-prise.
The central purpose of the paper is to
conceptualise this relationship and to learn
more about lifestyle entrepreneurship.
Tourism serves as an ideal case industry to
illustrate both relevant research in the
field of lifestyle entrepreneurship and a
conceptual framework to examine the
relationship between entrepreneurial
activities and perceived life quality. A
model is developed and presented in the
paper which highlights the relationship
between life quality and lifestyle
entrepreneurship. The model fills a gap in
the research of lifestyle entrepreneurship
as the correlation between lifestyle
entrepreneurs’ activities and their
perceived life quality remains an under-investigated
area. The model is able to
explain lifestyle entrepreneurs’ behaviour
with regard to their unwillingness to invest
more efforts in the growth ot their firms.
The paper concludes that lifestyle
entrepreneurs in tourism are motivated by
different factors compared to
Schumpeterian entrepreneurs. Future
policy, therefore, needs to reconsider
motivational measures or subsidy/grants
programmes which aim to support
entrepreneurial ventures.
Two papers feature in the second theme
on market segmentation. The first by
Ferreira Lopes, Rial Boubeta and Varela
Mallou explores a more applied theme in
illustrating the advantages of the combined
use of Conjoint Analysis and Cluster
Analysis in determining market segmenta-tion.
The authors argue that the benefits
are easily understandable since Conjoint
Analysis allows researchers to understand
the structure of the consumer’s preferences
while Cluster Analysis allows the grouping
of those consumers by their individual
preferences. With the considerable diversi-fication
that characterizes tourism, it
makes little sense to segment markets with
a priori procedures. As such, it is preferable
to carry out post hoc segmentation in order
to gain a more detailed and relevant under-standing
of tourist preferences; a procedure
that will create a competitive advantage.
Segmenting markets based on the prefer-ences
of consumers allows researchers and
professionals to better evaluate genuine
preferences (clusters) and to better develop
marketing strategies that more effectively
suit the preferences of consumers. The
theme of market segmentation continues in
the second paper by Ribeiro de Almeida,
Ferreira and Costa who discuss the Iinte-grated
Knowledge Management concept
and proposes a new matrix, namely the
EGIC Matrix (Integrated Knowledge Man-agement
Spiral). This new concept provides
a valuable contribution as a flexible meth-odology
that can be used to analyse differ-ent
destinations or even tourism market
segments.
The third theme of innovation and tour-ism
development introduces an interesting
mix of papers. The first by Cirer Costa
takes an alternative direction in that it
presents a historic example of the novel
elements that were derived from the first
grand Spanish Business Plan, which arose
Eduardo Parra Lopéz; Dimitrios Buhalis and Alan Fyall 357
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 7(3). 2009 ISSN 1695-7121
from the failure of a luxury hotel back in
Spain in 1903, which focused on satisfying
the demand for European vacation tourism.
The second paper by Stilling Blichfeldt
presents a case study, of a Danish caravan
site, that demonstrates that although tour-ism
is often said to be less innovative than
other industries with the lack of motiva-tion,
knowledge and resources often pro-vided
as the reasons why, innovation is
very much in evidence. This interesting
case study reveals a series of reasons why
this specific enterprise has been so innova-tive
and goes on to suggest that the find-ings
may transcend the case company and,
therefore, benefit the wider industry. Fol-lowing
papers by Hernández, Valades Sier-ra
and then Ascanio, the paper by Silva
and Neves analyses the social and economic
development of the creative industry arti-san
of a city of the Brazilian state of Minas
Gerais. There then follows a paper by Alves
and de Hilal who adopt a qualitative explo-ratory
study, undertaken by means of a
single-case study on Praia do Forte, a tour-ism
destination located on the Brazilian
coast. Use was made of secondary data and
in-depth interviews with local residents to
establish how the destination could first
follow a path of tourism development in a
way that differentiates it from competitors
and second, the degree to which the current
development can be viewed as sustainable.
The penultimate paper by Cavalcanti
Falcão, Silva Oliveira Santos and Pasa
Gómez examines innovative and productive
local chains in Porto de Galinhas/PE, Brazil
where the authors conclude that the tour-ism
industry remains at an initial stage of
development due to the consolidation
process between informal and formal local
groups. The final paper, a niche study by
Matusitze, introduces an interesting syn-thesis
on the social, cross-cultural, psycho-logical
and financial impact of the railroad
on American society over the past two hun-dred
years. The author concludes by stating
that the measure of progress in the United
States is tantamount to the mass of things
that had to be sacrificed to its construction.
It is hoped that the above collection of
papers serve as a catalyst for future papers
in this area and that conceptually, metho-dologically,
empirically and intellectually,
the academic community grasp the signi-ficance
and influence both in the past and
in the future of the roles of entrepreneur-ship
and innovation in tourism.
References
Hall, C. M. and Williams, A. M.
2008 Tourism and Innovation: Contempo-rary
Geographies of Leisure, Tourism
and Mobility. Abingdon: Routledge