DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2018.113
title: Supply chain innovation in tourism industry

description: Nature of the tourism industry, which is intangible, multiple dimensions, andcannot be protected new ideas by any patents, leads tourism organizations facing with difficulty in sustaining competitive advantages. Therefore, to develop an ability thatcan help tourism firms generating innovation is necessary for overcoming thesecharacteristics. Available literature suggests that in developing innovation in tourism,tourism enterprises are particularly dependent on the scale of external knowledge,which may be distributed through collaborative networks. Yet, little is known abouthow tourism firms properly utilize external knowledge in stimulating innovationcapability and innovation outputs such as firm performances. In this research, we thusaim at overcoming this research gap by trying to answer two main research questions(1) What is the impact of collaboration as a collaborative advantage on innovationcapability and performances? (2) Do collaboration can moderately enhance learningand adsorptive capacity’s competencies to stimulate innovation?The first question had been researched in the first study. In this paper, thereare two research objectives: (1) to empirically examine the complex impacts of supplychain collaboration, innovations and firm’ s performance in the hospitality industry.(2) to compares the effects of the internal and external capability of a firm on hotelinnovations. This empirical research is based on a structural survey of a stratifiedsample of 84 hotel firms in Bangkok, Thailand. The statistical analysis is firstempirically analyzed using regression with the OLS method, and then utilizing TwoStage Least-Square method for the robustness of the results. The results indicate thathuman capability and supply chain collaboration has a positive impact on internal innovation. However, only collaboration contributes to service innovation. As forperformance improvement, only internal innovation has a direct positive sign on hotelperformance. Interestingly, service innovation does not directly influenceperformance but influences hotel performance by the mediation of collaboration onservice innovation. This study contributes to tourism innovation literature byanalyzing the complex causality relationships between collaboration, innovations,and performance on hospitality firms. The results yield valuable knowledge fortheory and practice as useful implications in the hospitality industry.In the previous study, we had investigated the direct effects of three mainconstructs and the positive results supported the hypotheses generated. However,literature suggested that current results of direct relationships between collaborationand innovation capability on performance in tourism contexts are inconsistent. Thisresearch is therefore to uncover roles of a new construct, so-called collaborativeroutines on promoting relationships between internal and service innovationcapabilities as two distinct mechanisms, and performance. The study also examinesthe contingent effect of knowledge search on performance. Survey data from 181samples from the Thai tourism industry are gathered for analyses. Findingsdemonstrate that knowledge search and internal innovation capability have a directimpact on performance, whereas the effect of service innovation capability onperformance is significant only in the presence of collaborative routines.