Innovation Practices and Techniques for Nature-Based Health Tourism Competitiveness

Innovation is considered essential to the growth and long-term sustainability of health tourism companies and destinations. Continuous innovation takes place to improve the industry competitiveness, but especially the tourists’ experience and wellness with new product offerings. This Chapter collects and describes the innovation practices proposed and developed in some pilot regions of the HEALPS2 project consortium. The innovation practices identified in the project can be subdivided into three types, i.e., innovation techniques, innovation supporting tools, and innovative product offerings. All the practices were designed to target several operators of the Nature-based Health Tourism (NHT) industry, from tourism facilities and companies (especially small- and medium-sized enterprises) to regional councils and municipalities in charge of policy-making and tourism strategy development. HEALPS 2 innovation practices and techniques can be purposefully integrated at the regional and local level for a more innovation-driven industry strategy and business development, as well as facilitation of transnational cooperation among key actors, also beyond Alpine regions and NHT destinations

Nurturing Social Innovation Capabilities in Businesses Through Open Innovation

Companies are increasingly committed to pursuing social goals with the development of social innovation (SI), but they need to adopt adequate mechanisms to effectively manage, promote, and sustain it in the long term. This article aims to explore how businesses leverage open innovation (OI) practices to tackle social challenges in collaboration with SI stakeholders. We performed a multiple case study in three large manufacturing enterprises that are well-known for their excellence in innovation in terms of both SI impacts and OI depth. Results show that businesses develop and nurture a set of SI capabilities founded on purposeful knowledge exchanges across organizational boundaries, enhancing innovativeness, sustaining SI, and enlarging SI social and economic outcomes. The article provides key insights into the interplay between OI and SI, still underinvestigated in the literature, identifying the capabilities that should be fostered in the innovation processes of companies tackling broad societal challenges with openness

An Ontology-Based Decision Support System to Foster Innovation and Competitiveness Opportunities of Health Tourism Destinations

The competitiveness of nature-based Health Tourism (NHT) industry, especially in the Alpine regions, is increasingly linked to the sustainability and exploitation of unique natural resources of tourism destinations, which often lack the access to knowledge and networks of stakeholders to improve their offerings. In this sense, the use of digital tools can open up further opportunities to reconsider value offerings and better access different knowledge resources and relationships within the industry network. This Chapter illustrates the collaborative design approach adopted in HEALPS2 for the development of an ontology-based Decision Support System for health tourism destinations. The resulting ontology aims to model the relationships between the available natural resources, the value offerings and the target groups of NHT destinations. Moreover, the Collaborative Design approach foresees the involvement of end-users (i.e. not only tourism destinations, but also the network of stakeholders, and the actual and potential future tourists) as both sources of knowledge and validators of the ontology and its outputs, aiming to inform decision-making processes in a shared knowledge model that leverages on digital tools

Digital and Strategic Innovation for Alpine Health Tourism

This open access book presents a set of practical tools and collaborative solutions in multi-disciplinary settings to foster the Alpine Space health tourism industry’s innovation and competitiveness. The proposed solutions emerge as the result of the synergy among health, environment, tourism, digital, policy and strategy professionals. The approach underlines the pivotal role of a sustainable and ecomedical use of Alpine natural resources for health tourism destinations, and highlights the need of integrating aspects of natural resources’ healing effects, a shared knowledge of Alpine assets through digital solutions, and frames strategic approaches for the long-term development of the sector. The volume exploits the results of the three-years long EU research project HEALPS 2, which involved several stakeholders from the health tourism, healthcare and sustainable tourism industries. This book is relevant for health tourism destinations and facilities (hotels, clinics, wellness and spa companies), regional and local authorities (policy makers), business support organizations, researchers involved in digital healthcare and geoinformatics

How does complexity influence learning in projects? A multiple case study

This work aims to analyse the effects of complexity on decisions and learning in project-based organisations. Complexity is widely acknowledged as one of the main characteristics affecting project outcomes. We investigated factors giving rise to it and the subsequent organisational learning as new and codified knowledge to innovate project operations and we based our analysis on data collected from a sample of vessels projects in a leading company of shipbuilding. Results show that projects with a medium level of complexity (where factors such as variety of technologies and scale were limited but present) enabled learning and better subsequent operational decision-making

A Methodology for Participatory Stakeholder Engagement in Nature-Based Health Tourism

Participatory stakeholder engagement in strategy-making, for industries such as Nature-based Health Tourism (NHT), enhances the delivery of more useful and applicable strategies, with also higher chances to reach intended goals if compared to conventional top-down planning processes. This chapter describes the methodology identified and carried out in the HEALPS2 project to efficiently reach and engage stakeholders of Alpine NHT and to form a stakeholder group at the transnational level (including the engagement of EU-level ac-tors and networks). Based on the Quadruple Helix concept, the methodology integrates a process of stakeholder engagement and endorsement along three steps; the identification of the key points and the problems to be tackled for a successful stakeholder engagement; and the development of Regional and Transnational Stakeholder Groups that extend to the cooperation with EU-wide networks. Developing health tourism products and service chains, and sustaining them with strategies and policies, is a complex undertaking. The adoption of the stakeholder engagement approaches throughout the HEALPS2 project showed that it is of utmost importance to properly identify, involve and communicate with the stakeholders who effectively complement the success of the project, and its outcomes, in enhancing NHT competitiveness

Sustained value creation driven by digital connectivity: A multiple case study in the mechanical components industry

This paper investigates how digital connectivity drives new forms of sustained value creation in traditional in- dustries, where many firms still compete and strategize within a traditional industry structure and supply chain logic. We perform a multiple case study with four companies active in the vehicle component industry and implementing digital connectivity in a business-to-business (B2B) setting. Results show that digital connectivity enables greater transparency, trust, and collaboration with customers and creates new forms of value creation through companies’ strategizing actions – aimed at developing highly customized solutions – and critical capa- bilities – needed to configure a customer-centric value chain, integrate buyer-supplier digital resources, and improve the coherence between data-driven decision-making, lean management, and employees’ skills. We shed light on how manufacturers leveraged digital connectivity to successfully assimilate and scale up their digital- related capabilities across different dimensions, transforming their business models in a sustained way. This should also complement a change in the governance of customer transactions, fostering transparency and trust. Fine-tuning and expanding well-established B2B relationships through digital connectivity become a priority for traditional businesses to change to new and efficiently sustained value co-creation forms that can be com- plemented to a successful business model innovation or co-creation strictly linked to larger network connections

Framing open innovation in start-ups' incubators: A complexity theory perspective

Recently, concepts and principles from the Complexity Theory (or, generally speaking, the complexity sciences) have been applied as a perspective for capturing the influence of the context, interaction, and adaption in the innovation processes, such as the ones enabled in the business incubators. The purpose of this paper is to implement a frame of reference for understanding the start-ups’ incubator as a complex system where innovation, learning, and self-organization take place. We build on the interfaces between the Complexity Theory (i.e., complexity sciences) and Open Innovation literature to identify principles, patterns, and conditions that frame the incubation practices as simple rules aimed to sustain the innovation process towards the creation of new ventures. Results from the multiple case studies conducted in five incubators show that the features of variety, nonlinear interaction, interdependence, autonomy, and emergence of the incubation process framed as a complex system are enabled in different ways by the combination of the open innovation practices and services provided by the start-ups’ incubators, including the provision of physical infrastructure, access to funding streams, experts/entrepreneurs networking, education/workshops, mentorship, and advice