Adventure tourism: Exploring relations between knowledge and innovation

Abstract

In a rapidly changing tourism industry, the international competition is strong and the well-travelled tourists have high expectations. This has led to an increasing emphasis on the development of new services and experiences to attract tourists’ attention. Innovation has become a “buzz-word”, seen as essential for survival and growth.

With cases from Norway and NZ this thesis examines what innovation means in the context of adventure tourism businesses, and explore relations between such change processes and the available knowledge resources of the business. Several factors influence the knowledge resources of a given business, and this study looks specifically at how the size of the business, its location, and the maturity of the specific adventure tourism activity shapes processes of knowledge development and innovation.

The study takes it starting point in research on small businesses and tourism innovation, and draws on perspectives from economic geography and evolutionary theories of industry development. In addition sociological theories of leisure are included to explore how the close relations between adventure tourism and certain outdoor recreation milieus may benefit knowledge development.