On ICT & Tourism. The Role of Innovative Small Firms in the Tourism Industry

Abstract ch. 5 - The European Tourism Industry, particularly the Italian one, is substantially made up of small and medium firms. In the spirit of enhancing the knowledge and stimulating the debate on tourism innovation, this paper considers the role of small and medium firms (SMEs) and their use of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as their main interest of research. In the last twenty years, the amount of studies regarding SMEs working in the tourist industry has enormously increased , bringing in this field of research high levels of interdisciplinary approaches, in order to evaluate adequately also the role of other economic and social factors. For example, when referring to small businesses involved in the tourist industry, we are in a certain way thinking about tourist destinations as a whole by taking into account the policies and the processes related to the local development and the identity of a country. This paper will place a special focus on how much small tourist firms use ICT for their economic activities, as the use of ICT is one of the main research strands in the field of economic and management innovation.This paper will investigate how the implementation of ICT is able to support the promotion of small tourism businesses. Moreover, it will take into account the level of experience and the skills of the economic agents involved in the research and using the web. A case study of a local tourist destination will be presented based on a qualified dataset showing, and also as a result, a map of the ICT’s implementation. [...