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Emphasizing the role of residents as destination advocates, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of residents’ familiarity with, and, favorability of attractions on destination image.

A mixed methods research strategy was employed using 15 individual in-depth interviews and a survey questionnaire with a sample of n=364. The study utilizes an attraction familiarity index to classify respondents into four groups based on high, average, and low familiarity and examines the characteristics of each in the relationship between informational familiarity, experiential familiarity, and favorability and destination image.

The study reveals resident perceptions of attractions within the tourism product assembly framework and illustrates the positive relationship between the residents’ level of familiarity with, and favorability of visitor attractions and destination image. Further, the findings also demonstrate the significant role of demographic characteristics such as gender and length of residency in the area. The study findings suggest that temporary residents can function as destination advocates.

Employees and students from a prominent northeastern university were sampled, representing local residents and temporary residents respectively. While appropriate and fairly representative of the target market for the research questions in this investigation, more work is required to replicate this study utilizing representative samples across different locations.

Evidence from the study indicates the importance of marketing to residents as they serve as destination advocates. In particular, the residents’ familiarity with and favorability of attractions is critical to positive destination image. The research offers insights into the identification of potential segments of residents that require special attention.

Limited existing research investigates the role of residents as destination advocates, especially in the context of destinations that lack a primary tourism attraction but have a well-balanced mix of attractions.

A good customer experience means meeting the customer expectation. Thus, unexpected customer experience is usually a good point to initiate improvement or innovation for product or service design. Attempting to enhance the customer experience in the customer journey, this study aims to demonstrate a customer journey centred service design approach to receive the design requirements based on customers' needs and to use a systematic approach to generate solutions.

A holistic service design method named 3E model was proposed. It integrates customer experience journey map (CXJM), the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) and service assembly and service replacement mechanism into three design stages. In stage 1, CXJM is enhanced with emotional range analysis to identify the customer pain points as well as customers' requirements (CRs) in exhibition, tourism and hotel sectors for initializing service design. Stage 2 investigates the specific design requirements (DRs) of the smart exhibition system and the contradictions. Then, the innovative principles were analyzed. In Stage 3, expected exhibition service system was designed.

The new service system which named the smart expo system based on information and communication technology (ICT) is proposed. It consists of “Tourism Link assists”, “i-Kaohsiung hotel service center”, “Smart AEC” and “O2O e-tickets”.

The proposed 3E model builds a systematic and coherent design method for the smart exhibition service area. It provides the linkage and action-oriented guidance from customer pain points, service parameters, innovative principles to solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the collaborative practices of virtual teams carrying out knowledge‐based work and the tools required/used to assemble “collective” artefacts.

The vast majority of recent work on communities of practice is devoted to community management (i.e. discovering, building, and maintaining communities), dismissing or undermining community practices and how they are technologically mediated (i.e. the practice‐specific tools and artefacts involved). This paper investigates existing practices and makes use of scenarios to envision new distributed collective practices in a designated application domain. The instruments used include both empirical tools (i.e. survey of current practice and expert interviews) and analytical tools (i.e. scenarios of use, walkthroughs, and virtual prototyping) to provide insight towards the design of practice‐oriented toolkits.

The proposed approach is validated in the context of an electronic village of local interest with a thematic focus on regional tourism, highlighting the key role of “collective” knowledge management in information‐based industries whose products are non‐material (intangible) and knowledge is central to gaining competitive advantage. The results include a general model for practice‐oriented toolkits conceived of as separate software components from (but interoperable to) the community support system and devised to establish a place for engaging in the practice the community is about. This model is then used to build an operational toolkit for assembling vacation packages by cross‐organization virtual communities of practice.

Virtual communities of practice (or partnerships) necessitate smooth integration of community management and practice‐specific tasks and tools. Community management tasks can be supported by augmenting capabilities of existing community portals to allow for community registration, role undertaking, declaration of virtual assets, etc. Practice‐oriented tasks should be designed in such a way so as to capture and accommodate domain‐specific vocabulary.

Model‐based techniques and domain‐specific design languages are used as the unifying mechanism (i.e. software factory) for integrating community management and practice‐oriented artefacts. These techniques are designed and implemented into a software platform so as to facilitate the systematic accumulation and reuse of knowledge towards the construction of collective artefacts.

This paper aims to present the contribution of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) Afiliate Members’ Programme, its knowledge generation, prototypes and research initiatives to promote tourism as a driver of economic growth, inclusive development and environmental sustainability.

This paper focuses on the activities and projects of the UNWTO, as they generate market knowledge, promote competitive and sustainable tourism policies and instruments, foster tourism education and training and work to make tourism an effective tool for development through technical assistance projects in over 100 countries around the world.

The UNWTO Affiliate Members Programme serves as the major gateway for the collaboration between the private and public sectors, working together for the development of tourism. Bringing together over 470 companies, educational and research institutions, destinations and NGOs, this interactive platform provides a space for members to engage in dialogue, share information and take further action.

The UNWTO Affiliate Members Programme has identified some key focus areas for the overall development of tourism and accordingly designed public–private models of collaboration that can be applied in practice.

UNWTO offers a unique platform to stimulate public–private and academic partnerships in creation, dissemination and application of knowledge in tourism, focusing specifically on innovation.

This article evaluates contemporary Cuban economic policy and development prospects after a decade of market experimentation in a socialist context. An introductory historical review assesses the successes and failures of Cuban development policy in the 1970s and 1980s and describes the staggering dimensions of the economic crisis triggered by the abrupt disruption of Cuba's relations with the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. The next section, “To the market in the 1990s,” examines Cuban efforts to stabilize the economy in the early 1990s while maintaining a strong social safety net. The historic policy shift toward limited market liberalization within a state-dominated economy is analyzed and the key market concessions described. The economic turnaround of the late 1990s and Cuban macroeconomic and industrial performance over the past decade are then examined. The final part of the article evaluates the coherence and sustainability of Cuba's emerging economic model and assesses prospects for the survival of some form of Cuban socialism.

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on social enterprises and business model innovation. Particularly, it sheds some light on those factors that turn a social innovation initiative into a success, both in terms of meeting social needs and achieving economic sustainability.

By using a grounded theory approach, an inductive comparative case study is conducted. Two work integration social enterprises in the hospitality and tourism sector are selected. Both companies are located in Barcelona (Spain) under the same legal regulation and economic situation and initially run a manufacturing business. Due to the economic crisis they were forced to reinvent themselves to survive. Data were collected from different sources and coded using content analysis procedures.

Results indicate that three factors, namely, value proposition, appropriate market research and stakeholder involvement, heavily contributed to firm’s success, corroborating previous studies. Furthermore, our study reveals that social need pressures and managerial trust on employees are additional factors that drive social business model innovation.

Changes in the demand, the rules governing the market or economic downturns are external drivers for demand-pull innovations. In such context, firms need to reformulate their business models if they wish to survive. Acknowledging the factors that help firms overcome these obstacles is of great interest for both academics and entrepreneurs.

Social innovation in business models is a topic still poorly defined in the literature, yet, its boundaries to other fields are still fuzzy. This paper aims to fulfill this gap by presenting the theoretical domain in which this topic fits in and evidencing those successful factors that should be considered when designing and implementing a business model innovation which may help other firms facing a similar process.