MEASUREMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF INNOVATION IN SERVICES: ESSAYS ON ICT INVESTMENT, ORCHESTRATION, AND THE ROLE OF THE DESTINATION MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION

Abstract

Innovation in the services sector is becoming increasingly important to understanding the innovative behavior of the US economy, as more and more sectors become increasingly populated with services. Traditional goods-manufacturing sectors remain a dominant theoretical and empirical force with respect to the measurement and management of innovation activity at different levels of the economy. This includes industry, sector, and firm levels of theory and practice. As the shifting trajectory away from traditional technology-manufacturing to services, it becomes incumbent on researchers in service dominated sectors such as tourism to better understand effective ways to measure and manage innovation in services. This dissertation comprises three essays which singly and in combination, focus on the measurement and management of innovation in services with specific and increasing attention to the role of the destination management organization. The major bodies of literature used in these essays are the innovation literature, destination marketing and management, and networks. There are multiple lenses used to analyze services within the tourism context at the industry, destination, and organization levels. In addition to multiple lenses, multiple analytic methods are employed raging from latent growth modeling techniques to convergent parallel mixed methodology. The thesis contributes to the destination management and marketing literature in three ways. First, the thesis integrates tourism production industry into the comparison of between and within group trajectories. Second, the study empirically tests the mediating effect of network orchestration, and contributes mixed methods to the tourism field.