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RESOURCES


RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Author : Graham Miller & Caroline Scarles
School/Work Place : University of Surrey, UK
Contact : g.miller@surrey.ac.uk
Year : 2007

Tether (2003) describes innovation within service industries as having a Cinderella status - marginal and neglected. The traditional approach to thinking about innovation has been to concentrate on manufacturing and within that, the role of research and development to produce technological invention that can lead to product innovation (Miles 2005). However, the slow recognition that services occupy an increasingly important part of the world’s economic development has forced researchers into considering how innovation works outside manufacturing (von Tunzelmann and Acha, 2005). Jacob, Tinoré, Guilo, Bravo and Ulet (2003) argue there is a need for in-depth, exploratory and qualitative studies to help build the research base within service innovation. This paper attends to this call using the results of face to face interviews with senior managers to introduce TUI AG’s innovation programme, the ‘InnOlympics’. TUI AG describes itself as an innovative tourism group, whilst also being the world’s largest tour operator, with a turnover of more than €14.1 billion; it owns approximately 3,300 travel agencies, 100 aircraft, 35 incoming agencies and 300 hotels with over 165,000 beds in 30 countries. TUI operates in more than 70 countries with over 5,000 travel reps (TUI AG 2007). With the OECD (Kruger 2004) believing that sustainability offers a key opportunity for innovation within the tourism industry, this paper presents lessons to be learned from TUI AG’s programme for innovation for other tour operators wishing to become more innovative within the field of sustainable tourism.


List of Articles
No. Subject Viewssort Date
14 Think Tank VIII An Assessment of Efforts to Enhance the Quality of Lif... file 3773 Oct 13, 2013

Quality of life studies are usually either objective or subjective in nature. Objective quality of life studies concentrate on social indicators whereas subjective quality of life studies attempt to assess the perceived satisfaction that in...

Author: Turgut Var, Erhan Ada, Gökce Ozdemir & Deniz Hasirci 

Year: 2008 

13 Think Tank X Re-thinking Resort Growth and Governance: An Evolution... file 3780 Oct 13, 2013

Rapid growth in resort areas, combined with environmental and market stresses, has recently created concern amongst resort decision-makers about future paths of development. Growth models have operated effectively in maintaining resort comp...

Author: Alison M. Gill & Peter W. Williams 

Year: 2010 

12 Think Tank IX The West in the East: Conflict in the Values of Volunt... file 4417 Oct 13, 2013

Consequently, the aim of this research was to explore the complexity of trying to work within a framework of sustainability, with a given number of stakeholders (in this case, a UK organisation, its customers (volunteers, primarily British) ...

Author: Angela M. Benson 

Year: 2009 

» Think Tank VII Getting Fit to Innovate: TUI's InnOlympics file 4622 Oct 13, 2013

Tether (2003) describes innovation within service industries as having a Cinderella status - marginal and neglected. The traditional approach to thinking about innovation has been to concentrate on manufacturing and within that, the role of...

Author: Graham Miller & Caroline Scarles 

Year: 2007 

10 Think Tank IV Sustainability in a Mature Mass-Tourism Destination: T... file 4687 Oct 13, 2013

Most destinations are struggling to achieve sustainability for their economies, their environments, their cultures and their tourism industries. This laudatory, idealistic and complex process involves many sectors of the industry, the commun...

Author: Pauline Sheldon, John Knox & Kem Lowry 

Year: 2004 

9 Think Tank VII Rural Adventure Tourism and Social Entrepreneurship file 4793 Oct 13, 2013

The intent of this research is to provide a comparative analysis of several innovative social entrepreneurial businesses operating within the realm of rural adventure tourism. This qualitative, case-based research explores six companies, wh...

Author: Christina Heyniger & Kristin Lamoureaux 

Year: 2007 

8 Think Tank VII Volunteer Tourism: Sustainable Innovation in Tourism, ... file 6074 Oct 13, 2013

This is a study of the relationships between two volunteer tourism host communities and the volunteer tourists who visit them. One is a declining rural community located in the Appalachian mountains of the United States. The other is in a ra...

Author: Nancy McGehee 

Year: 2007 

7 Think Tank IX Labour Justice and Sustainable Tourism: The Centrality... file 6990 Oct 13, 2013

What we value is intricately linked to our morality and our ethics, whether personal or corporate. Sustainability is essentially a statement of morality, embedding as it does the notion of inter- and intra-generational equity. This includes,...

Author: Stephanie Chok & Jim Macbeth 

Year: 2009 

6 Think Tank VI Stakeholder involvement, culture and accountability in... file 7215 Oct 13, 2013

Following its historical rise and fall, America’s first industrialized polluted landscape garnered federal and local support to remedy its near destruction. Today, the Blackstone Valley is a pragmatic example of translating theory into pract...

Author: Robert Billington, Veronica Cadoppi & Natalie Carter 

Year: 2006 

OPA: 2006 Outstanding Paper Award Winner 

5 OPA award Stakeholder involvement, culture and accountability in... file 7653 Oct 13, 2013

Following its historical rise and fall, America’s first industrialized polluted landscape garnered federal and local support to remedy its near destruction. Today, the Blackstone Valley is a pragmatic example of translating theory into pract...

Author: Robert Billington, Veronica Cadoppi & Natalie Carter 

Year: 2006 

OPA: 2006 Outstanding Paper Award Winner 

4 Think Tank IX Malay Small Family Business Values file 7736 Dec 19, 2013

In Malaysia approximately 90% of the businesses are categorized as small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The majority of these small businesses are family owned and make a significant contribution to Malaysian Gross Domestic Product. The prev...

Author: Askiah Jamaluddin & Jack Carlsen 

Year: 2009 

3 Think Tank VII Tourism Resource Teams: Innovation with and for touris... file 12110 Oct 13, 2013

Communities have a variety of interest levels in tourism overall, including sustainable tourism (WTO, 2002). While we have witnessed increased awareness and discussions about sustainability and sustainable tourism, there is often a lack of s...

Author: Cynthia Messer, Ingrid Schneider & Okechukwu Ukaga 

Year: 2007 

2 Think Tank VII Branding Sustainability: Taking 'The Natural Step' in ... file 63446 Oct 13, 2013

Translation of the concept of sustainability into practice is fraught with problems. While policy advances in all sectors of the economy have made steps in the right direction the lack of clarity in defining what is meant by 'sustainability...

Author: Alison Gill & Peter Williams 

Year: 2007 

1 Think Tank VIII Moving from Destination Marketing to Destination Manag... file 70601 Oct 13, 2013

This paper provides a case study of how a tourism organisation has interpreted the change from a ‘marketing’ to a ‘management’ approach in destination development. It begins by looking at what the literature has said about destination manag...

Author: David Foster 

Year: 2008 

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