Determinants And Effects Of Hotel Innovation

It has been almost30years after the Reform of China, hotel industry has dramatically developed and has brought people’s attention from all over the world. However, the solo increase of the hotel scale in China hasn’t improved the weak position in the world hotel industry system. The mode of extensive economic growth in Chinese hotel industry and the absence of modern industry elements, such as innovative capacity, may influence the competitiveness and sustainable development of China’s hotel industry. From the perspective of national macro policy, the State Council promulgated the Opinion on Accelerating the Development of Tourism, which definitely points out that, China’s tourism industry which including hotel firms is becoming the strategic pillar industry of national economy and the modern service industry more satisfactory to people, and that the development of tourism shall be elevated from the industrial, departmental, and economic levels to the strategic level of national development. So how to achieve the rational and substaintional development of China’s hotel industry through hotel innovating has become a prominent problem. Meanwhile, in the past decade, the changes in hotel business mode caused by ICT may be the most significantly and far-reaching impact in tourism industry. When we cheered by the patterns changes in hotel consumption influenced by Internet, the smart mobilephone has been becoming another prominently technical support for the development of hotel industry.In this context, the hotel innovation is becoming a hot topic of tourism research in the world. The hotel innovation, however, is an emerging research area, the relevant researches of which havn’t been formed into theoretical system. Currently, most of the relavant studies focused on the identification of factors that determine the innovative activities in hotel industry, especially focus on the effects of ICT on hotel innovation. Few scholars researched the firm-level characteristics of hotel innovation and how these determinants influence the innovation in hotel firms. Therefore, in terms of the determinants and effects of hotel innovation, reasonable and satisfied answers couldn’t be obtained from the existing literatures. In order to improve the hotel management practice, it’s necessary to research on the determinants of hotel innovation. Thus, according to the materials collected from literature review and spot research, the paper posed three detailed research questions:(1) concept, dimensions and determinants of hotel innovation;(2) how these factors influence the hotel innovation;(3) the effects of hotel innovation on hotel performance. First of all, the research gained insight into determinants that may facilitate or impede the hotel innovation through surveying the recent burgeoning literatures that empirically examined the factors’ effects on hotel innovation. Secondly, a qualitative study has been undertaken to explore how these factors affect the hotel’s innovation activities in China Mainland, and then a conceptual framework for understanding the mechanism for hotel innovation and the effects of hotel innovation on hotel performance was presented; Tirdly, based on the theories of service innovation and tourism innovation, some hypotheses regarding the conceptual framwork have been proposed; Forthly, these hypotheses had been tested by using the data collected from survey; Finally, according to the results of empirical study, suggestions have been offered for the hotel innovation management.Major findings were as follows:(1) hotel’s external knowledge sources and internal resources have the positive impact on hotel innovation, and external knowledge sources exert greater influence on hotel innovation;(2) the effects of hotel’s external knowledge soureces on hotel innovation were partly mediated by hotel’s absorptive capacity;(3) hotel’s internal resources are antecedents that affect potential and realized hotel’s absorptive capacity;(4) hotel innovation has significantly positive effects on hotel performance.The important contributions in the paper were as follows:(1) we explained and developed a multidimensional measure of hotel innovation. Second-order confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to demonstrate the convergent and discriminant validity of four dimensions of hotel innovation. Hotel innovation consists of four dimensions service/product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation and managerial innovation;(2) the paper researched on the effects of hotel’s external knowledge sources on hotel’s innovation. The results showed that the effects of hotel’s external knowledge soureces on hotel innovation were partly mediated by hotel’s absorptive capacity, which is a fresh aspect for hotel innovation research. This result is helpful for us to explain why hotels have the innovation activities, even though there aren’t R&D department in hotels;(3) the research proposed the effects of hotel innovation on hotel performance, and we argued that hotel innovation has a significantly positive effect on hotel performance, which highlights that innovation has an important role to improve the performance of hotel.According to the logic of "resource-capacity-performace", the conceptual framework has been constructed to explore the relationship and interactions existing among the hotel’s external knowledge sources, hotel’s internal resources, hotel’s absorptive capacities, hotel innovation and hotel performance. In summary, the above theoretical and empirical studies improve and enrich the hotel’s innovation theory, which can provide the theoretical and practical guidelines for hotels and government.