A STUDY OF STRATEGIC INNOVATION PRACTICES WITHIN THE IRISH TOURISM INDUSTRY Correspondence to:

One dominant theme that continuously appears to emerge from national reports is that, in order for small tourism firms to surmount the detrimental effects of losing competitiveness (caused mainly by globalisation and the changing economic climate) emphasis must be directed at encouraging these companies to adopt a strategic innovation practice and become strategic innovators (The Tourism Policy Review, 2003). However, what makes good strategic practice in the context of innovativeness and thus increasing firm competitiveness is not clearly understood within the literature. Furthermore, research to date tends to focus on micro or product-level innovation and ignores the reality that small firms need to continually innovative as a firm-level strategic objective, especially considering that “innovations in and of themselves are not necessarily the key to long-term business success ” (Sigauw et al 2006: 556). Therefore this paper makes a unique contribution to a very significant gap in the innovation and business strategy literature, by reviewing current work and conceptualizing strategic practices that link effective strategy to enhance innovativeness. Our conceptualization is elaborated with a set of propositions which have academic implications for enriching resource based theory and practical implications for managing the innovativeness journey