Tourism innovation policy: Implementation and outcomes

The paper opens the “black box” of tourism innovation policy implementation through an analysis of the Spanish Programme of Innovative Business Groups that foster innovation through hybrid top-down bottom-up collaboration embedded in clusters. The focus is on three main issues: process of policy implementation, types of innovation that emerged, and the outcomes and barriers. The findings show the contradictions of this hybrid model of implementation with mixed outcomes of successful collaborations and abandoned trajectories. The Programme has stimulated the ‘propensity’ to innovate resulting in different types of innovation but has revealed the existence of mutually-reinforcing barriers. Some suggestions for future improvements of tourism innovation policies are offered including the importance of polycentricity in effective policy formulation and implementation.The research paper has been supported by the Spanish National R&D&I Plan 2008-2011 (CSO2011-26396). The authors are grateful to the state owned company "Innovation Management and Tourism Technologies, SEGITTUR" for their generous support and data provision. Isabel Rodriguez thanks the University of Alicante who funded her visit to the University of Surrey, facilitating the author’s collaboration