Abstract
The complex nature of tourism, its strong inter-sectoral relationships and regional dimension challenge innovation. The advent of smart specialisation, which focuses on regional diversification across sectors, offers considerable and hitherto largely unrealized potential for developing innovative tourism policies within this new agenda. This paper addresses the understudied concept of tourism diversification and its unrealized relevance to smart specialisation, which has emerged as a mainstream logic underpinning EU Cohesion Policy reforms and has diffused into other OECD countries. It provides a theoretical framework for studying product, market, sectoral and regional diversification as well as related variety in tourism. Some policy implications for realizing tourism diversification and for the potential role of tourism in smart specialisation strategies in particular are suggested.
Highlights
Tourism policies are recognised for supporting employment and for their quick return for investment, tax coffers, foreign exchange, earnings [1], diversifying economies at the local, regional and national scales and, more recently, in creating inter-sectoral linkages [2,3,4,5,6]
This paper suggests that tourism diversification strategies should be approached from the recent Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) context, which is relevant to place-based economies such as those dominated by tourism
This paper provides an original contribution to the study of tourism diversification and smart specialisation
Summary
Tourism policies are recognised for supporting employment and for their quick return for investment, tax coffers, foreign exchange, earnings [1], diversifying economies at the local, regional and national scales and, more recently, in creating inter-sectoral linkages [2,3,4,5,6]. This is quite surprising given that, in practice, tourism is one of the most common regional innovation priorities within the main category of ‘business areas and target markets’ for smart specialisation and innovation priority areas selected by regional actors across the EU These business areas and target markets aim to build a regional competitive advantage by addressing EU emerging market potentials, developing and matching research and innovation in knowledge domains to business needs [29,30]. It suggests that diversification policies should be examined at the product/market, sectoral and regional levels including the role of RV in maintaining linkages between tourism sub-sectors and between tourism and other (non-tourism) sectors It identifies tourism-related particularities in smart specialisation processes including prioritisation, monitoring and evaluation and considers some implications for tourism diversification and its role in smart specialisation strategies
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