Few would argue that innovation is essential to business growth. Yet, it seems surprising that for many hoteliers something as simple as defining innovation can be a challenge.
Innovation is both a process and an outcome.
- As a process, innovations can impact a corporation’s internal stakeholders (inward-facing), target end-users (outward-facing), draw from outside knowledge (open innovation) or respond to vertical integration and exclusive control (closed innovation).
- As an outcome, innovations are defined in terms of their degree of newness or radicalness. Solutions that are new to an organization are counted among ‘incremental innovations’. A ‘radical innovation’ provides solutions that are ‘new to the world’.
Yet, the hospitality industry is less prone to innovate than other service activities.
In the hotel industry, like in most service activities, the interplay between customers and firms broadens the scope of innovation and departs from the narrower technology-driven innovation dominant in manufacturing.
However, not only developing truly innovative concepts (i.e. ideas that add value to an existing service) and embedding them within a hotel’s operations, present their own sets of challenges – but as true innovations often breed copycats, creating strong differentiators and barriers to inhibit imitation, can be daunting for hotel operators.
Hospitality Innovation Report: Key Takeaways
Who are the biggest innovators in hospitality?
We put six innovation scenarios to test and asked hospitality industry executives what scenario(s) were more likely to take place in their organization within the next three to five years.
Two main groups emerged:
- One from innovators in big corporations, who intend to move beyond incremental improvements for sources of breakthrough innovation. Although hospitality corporate leaders in innovation remain in the minority and are unevenly distributed across geographies and ownership structures, a few standout companies are demonstrating that innovation can be a driver of renewal, efficiency and lasting business value.
- The other from small/medium-sized enterprises (SME) and family businesses, who tend to believe they do not have the resources to develop their own innovation strategies and for whom innovation management will remain elusive.
