Tourism Innovation in the Adriatic-Ionian Region: Questioning the Understanding of Innovation

Today, tourism as the most important global service industry faces many challenges, which call for innovations. That includes product (new products and services), process (new ways of delivering tourist services), logistical (new ways of providing products/services to tourists), and market innovations (new marketing methods or market behaviour). To detect the number and types of tourism innovations funded by the EU in the Adriatic-Ionian region (AIR), a desk research approach and a survey was carried out between 2020 and 2022. The purpose of our work was to detect projects fostering innovations in sustainable tourism, analyse their innovation capacity and propose possible policy enhancements. The main research questions were: Firstly, are financial incentives appropriate measures to foster innovations? and secondly what is the role of governance models of the EUSAIR in fostering innovations in sustainable tourism? In total, 88 projects were detected fostering different types of innovations. The results demonstrate an uneven geographical distribution of financial incentives for innovative projects and underline the lack of a clear understanding of the concept of innovation in funded projects and in seconded national administration in the AIR. Additionally, our findings show that financial incentives, although welcome, do not always foster innovations. Rather, an effective governance should be in place to tailor the appropriate financial incentives and guide the process. Our work contributes to the development of new guidelines related to growth and innovation in sustainable tourism in the AIR.