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The purpose of this study is to explore which actors in the hospitality industry drive innovation in hospitality family firms and particularly aims at understanding how these drivers contribute to create and sustain competitive advantage. The peculiar role of family dynamics in these efforts is considered.

Narrative interviews in 22 hospitality family firms in Western Austria were conducted. Data were analyzed using the qualitative text analysis software GABEK©.

Results show that the entrepreneurial family and employees are key drivers for innovation as actors internal to the firm, but also the guests and regional competitors as external drivers provide comprehensive innovation input. These innovation efforts are perceived to stimulate growth and business development.

Future research might want to test and further concretize the propositions from this study in quantitative surveys. Additionally, the entrepreneurial family formed the central focus of this study; thus it would be interesting to investigate the other actors identified as key drivers of innovation in hospitality family firms.

Recommendations to entrepreneurs and regional politics are to capitalize on the identified actors as important drivers of innovation.

Research widely agrees that in hospitality collaboration, innovation is necessary, for many actors jointly offer complex products and services to tourists. However, it remains unclear which actors are mainly driving innovation in hospitality and how they do this, particularly when considering that the majority of firms in this industry are family firms and therefore family dynamics need to be considered for analysis.

The hospitality industry the world over is transforming from a product-focused, physical-asset-intensive business to a customer-focused, experience-centric one. This research aims at evolving a typology of customer-centric hospitality innovations. It attempts to explicitly capture the intrinsic DNA of hospitality innovations in the Indian context by exemplifying the typology posited with customer service innovations adopted by contemporary hoteliers that provide new ways of managing and enhancing customer experience.

This study is based on primary research through qualitative interviews conducted with select hospitality professionals, supplemented by secondary research in the form of a review of academic literature, as well as other secondary data sources such as company websites and travel websites which shed light on customer service innovations in the Indian context.

To develop and sustain competitive advantage, hospitality businesses are increasingly channelizing their efforts to provide innovative and holistic experiential service offerings. Service innovations are being tailored to cater to the unique personal tastes and requirements of hotel guests to connect with individual guests on a personal and emotional level to create memorable hospitality experiences.

Practitioners, researchers and educationists in the hospitality industry would find the implications of this study useful in the context of the present customer-centric business environment where hotels are constantly striving to meet the exponentially rising bar of guest expectations.

The research highlights that it is critical to keep the customers’ perspectives central while designing innovative hospitality products. Further, it is important to create a cadre of innovation champions and service enthusiasts who can engender a culture of service innovation within the organisation.

The purpose of this review paper is to identify the themes of hospitality and tourism innovation research published in academic and trade journals between 2010 and 2020, to explore the common and different areas of interest between academia and the industry and to examine the trends of innovation research themes during this period to suggest future research directions.

The EBSCO Hospitality and Tourism Index was used as the data source. Co-word analysis was conducted via the Leximancer software to identify key areas of interest in hospitality and tourism innovation. Trends in hospitality and tourism innovation over the ten-year period were revealed by a time-dimension analysis.

This study produced a conceptual map demonstrating focal points and trends in hospitality and tourism innovation. Trade journals were found to be dominated by product innovation driven by technological development, while academic journals covered more topics, such as employee innovation, sustainable innovation, leadership innovation and user generated content (UGC). Academia was shown to follow in the footsteps of industry in publication on several topics. Furthermore, academic interest in certain topics, such as hotel service innovation, UGC and social media, lasted several years.

This study can facilitate knowledge transfer between academia and the industry. It also provides directions for future research based on historical and comparative analysis.

This research extends the scope of existing review studies by including articles published by trade journals. It also adds a time dimension, which helps to unveil the evolution process of hospitality and tourism innovation research and practice.

This study aims to investigate the effects of entrepreneurial leadership on service innovation in the hospitality industry and examine the mediating effects of market-sensing capability and knowledge acquisition. Additionally, the study explores the moderating role of competitive intensity in the relationships between market-sensing capability, knowledge acquisition and service innovation, drawing on the dynamic capability theory and resource dependence theory.

The data for this study were obtained from 322 employees and 137 leaders working in 103 hotels in Vietnam, using a time-lagged approach. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in SPSS Amos 28.

The results of this study reveal a significant positive association between entrepreneurial leadership and service innovation, with mediation effects observed through both knowledge acquisition and market-sensing capability. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that competitive intensity moderates the association between knowledge acquisition and service innovation.

The results of this study provide implications for hospitality firms to cultivate entrepreneurial leadership through leadership training and development programs and enhance their dynamic capabilities (i.e. market-sensing capability and knowledge acquisition) to allow them to survive and develop in a competitive market.

This study advances entrepreneurial leadership research in the hospitality context by identifying mediating and moderating mechanisms that translate entrepreneurial leadership into hospitality firms’ service innovation.

Service innovation benefits hospitality organizations’ service quality and competitive advantages. However, how and when team culture amplifies team service innovation is still not fully comprehended. Thus, this study aims to reveal the mediation and moderation mechanisms behind the team-level culture and service innovation nexus.

This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to validate the research model. The authors collected data from leaders and their members working in the hospitality sector in China.

The results demonstrated the positive nexus of developmental culture and team service innovation. This nexus was sequentially mediated by aggregated creative role identity and aggregated creative self-efficacy and was also strengthened by task interdependence.

The results indicated that hospitality practitioners should consistently instill the values of developmental culture into their members to trigger their teams’ service innovative endeavors. They should also design more tasks requiring intensive teamwork and encourage members to complete these tasks collaboratively.

This study advances the understanding of the direct, mediating and moderating effects behind team service innovation.

While acknowledging the importance of innovation capability and its potential for creating competitive advantage for firms, the purpose of this paper is to further explain how firms can gain the most from this potential. In the face of the low success rate of innovations and innovation activities in the hospitality sector, this study explains – through the dynamic capability perspective – that building a flexible organization is instrumental in creating competitive advantage out of innovation capabilities.

The study uses data from hospitality firms operating in an emerging economy with a fast-growing hospitality sector. As this study uses survey and statistical methods, the possibility of common method bias is addressed by partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized relationships.

The study finds that organizational flexibility (OF) is an important mediator in the relationship between innovation capabilities and competitive advantage. The study explains that building a flexible organization is instrumental in creating competitive advantage out of innovation capabilities in hospitality firms.

This study suggests that relying only on innovation capability offers hospitality firms just a fraction of what would be gained if such capabilities are properly aligned with OF. This is because such alignment generates better response power to changing needs as the firm becomes more mobile, responsive and agile to rapidly identify market trends, adjust internal operations and respond quickly to new market demand.

This study aims to explore which drivers of innovation in the hospitality industry optimise hospitality performance in a multivariate nexus of restaurants’ value system for hospitality (VSH) and internal–external power understanding capability.

The study applied a cross-sectional questionnaire survey research design, targeting employees who were working in full-service restaurants. Descriptive statistic, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM) were performed. A total of 364 respondent’s responses were used in the data analyses.

Results of the empirical analysis reveal that collaborative innovation capability has the closest relationship with hospitality performance optimisation (HPO), followed by VSH, employee creativity and knowledge management system capability. The analysis with the bootstrapping method shows that VSH mediates the relationship between the drivers of innovation and HPO. The empirical results also suggest that firms’ capabilities of understanding internal and external environments are significant moderators of the relationship between VSH and HPO.

The empirical findings provide restaurant managers with an improved understanding of how the drivers of innovation capability influence HPO. Findings from this research emphasise that hotel managers should consider internal and external environmental issues to adjust their strategies for improving hospitality performance in a competitive environment.

Findings suggest that restaurant managers should implement the drivers of innovation in their respective work environment, together with their adequate involvement with staff and understanding of environmental issues, to produce innovative hospitality strategies.

This research contributes a comprehensive framework of HPO in the restaurant business setting that leads to a competitive advantage. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the pioneer studies to contribute to the hospitality literature that investigates the effect of the drivers of innovation on VSH and HPO by considering the moderation role of internal and external environmental understanding capability.

Digitalization accelerates the need of tourism and hospitality ecosystems to reframe business models in line with a data-driven orientation that can foster value creation and innovation. Since the question of data-driven business models (DDBMs) in hospitality remains underexplored, this paper aims at (1) revealing the key dimensions of the data-driven redefinition of business models in smart hospitality ecosystems and (2) conceptualizing the key drivers underlying the emergence of innovation in these ecosystems.

The empirical research is based on semi-structured interviews collected from a sample of hospitality managers, employed in three different accommodation services, i.e. hotels, bed and breakfast (B&Bs) and guesthouses, to explore data-driven strategies and practices employed on site.

The findings allow to devise a conceptual framework that classifies the enabling dimensions of DDBMs in smart hospitality ecosystems. Here, the centrality of strategy conducive to the development of data-driven innovation is stressed.

The study thus developed a conceptual framework that will serve as a tool to examine the impact of digitalization in other service industries. This study will also be useful for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) managers, who seek to understand the possibilities data-driven management strategies offer in view of stimulating innovation in the managers' companies.

The paper reinterprets value creation practices in business models through the lens of data-driven approaches. In this way, this paper offers a new (conceptual and empirical) perspective to investigate how the hospitality sector at large can use the massive amounts of data available to foster innovation in the sector.

The purpose of this study is to test the usefulness of the literature-based innovation output (LBIO) approach to identify innovation types from press releases of hospitality firms and to evaluate if the typology captures the effect of innovation on firm value.

The LBIO approach was applied to three years of press releases from two publicly traded lodging firms in the USA announcing innovations. A database of lodging and innovation relevant terms was compiled. Starting with classifications found in the innovation literature, the researchers coded each announcement. Coded announcements were clustered into innovation types using pairwise similarity analysis. Event study analysis assessed the efficacy of the overall method to find types that were useful to measure the impact on firm value from the company’s adoption of an innovation.

Cluster analysis identified four lodging innovation types: property and location, marketing, strategic development and guest experiences. These types corresponded closely with the innovation classification suggested by the Oslo Manual. The event study found that the typology was useful in determining the market value effects of an innovation.

This study focused on innovation; future studies might test other organizational factors. The study uses data from two large, publicly traded hospitality firms and may not extend to smaller, privately held businesses. A key implication is that human coding is sufficient to identify innovation types that correspond closely with existing classifications and affect firm value.

This study successful learns from hospitality press releases to identify a hospitality innovation typology and tests type impact on firm value.

Innovation and new services’ development are important strategic features to pledge sustainable wealth and growth for every industry, but in particular for those industries where markets are saturated and clients choose services and products from all over the world, such as in the case of the hospitality industry. In the hospitality context, there is little research on innovation. The purpose of this study is to understand how innovation and customer-oriented value systems can affect performance in the context of the hospitality industry.

A comprehensive literature review is conducted to identify the major indices of innovation in the context of the hospitality industry. A self-administered questionnaire survey was used, and the target population included the managers and employees who work in the 3- and 4-star hotels of Isfahan. The sample size was 226. A convenience sampling approach was used to collect the required sample.

The results of structural equation modelling indicated that customer orientation and innovativeness orientation have a significant influence on hotel performance. Furthermore, customer orientation influenced the innovativeness orientation of hotel employees.

This paper provides a valuable insight into the measurement of innovation, customer orientation and performance in the hospitality industry and offers a foundation for future hospitality innovation research.