Research On Innovation Type And Mechanism Of Tourism Enterprises

With the robust development of China’s tourism industry, the market concentration ratio of the industry is declining, and the competition among China’s tourism enterprises is becoming increasingly fierce, which result in a decline in corporate profits. In this context, China’s tourism enterprises not only want to maximize profits by providing high value-added products and services, but also hope to get away from the highly competitive market. From textbooks in management, a solution to achieve these goals is innovation. Because innovation is regarded as a competitive advantage of enterprises, which is able to earn more profits for the enterprise, improve the quality of its products or services and customer satisfaction, increase market share, raise productivity, and even optimize the enterprise’s own image.In this context, the innovation in tourism enterprises is becoming a hot topic of tourism research around the world. The tourism innovation, however, is an emerging research area, which has not been formed into a theoretical system. Currently, the most studies were based on the research of service innovation, which only focused on the explanation of the relevant concepts. Few scholars studied on the types of tourism innovation and their mechanism at the firm level. Therefore, in terms of the question about how to implement innovation in practice, reasonable and satisfied answers could not be obtained from the existing literatures. Thus, according to the materials collected from literature review and field research, the paper posed four detailed research questions:(1) proposing the main types of tourism innovation, innovation drivers and determinants, and verifying them;(2) analyzing and discriminating the relationship or difference between tourism innovation drivers and innovation determinants;(3) testing whether there is a difference among various innovation drivers in terms of their roles in generating innovation types;(4) testing whether there is a difference among various innovation determinants in terms of the degree of influence on different innovation types. This paper was written according to a logical framework as follow:"review the literatures-put forward the core concepts-build a conceptual model and propose research hypothesis-conduct an empirical analysis-make conclusions". By using content analysis, binary logistic regression, non-parametric tests and other research methods, the major findings included the following four aspects. First of all, our research proposed four types of innovation,11kinds of innovation drivers and15kinds of innovation determinants. Part of drivers and determinants were confirmed, that is, the hypothesis Ⅰ&Ⅱ were partially confirmed. Secondly, the study demonstrated innovation drivers and innovation determinants are not the same concept. Thirdly, there is no significant difference among innovation drivers, that is, the hypothesis Ⅲ was not confirmed. Finally, there is a significant difference among innovation determinants in terms of their degree of influence on various innovation types, that is, the hypothesis IV was confirmed.The important contributions of this paper were as follows:(1) we systematically proposed the core concepts of tourism innovation;(2) the paper explained the difference and relationship between innovation drivers and innovation determinants;(3) we constructed a conceptual model that showed the relationship among innovation types, innovation drivers and innovation determinants;(4) our research tested the difference among the mechanism of the four innovation types.