Sustainable Innovation

Abstract

Tourism is an industry, very focused on economic growth, with significant negative environmental and social impacts. Consequently, the tourism industry faces major challenges related to sustainability. Sustainable innovation is a tool that contributes not only to increased business competitiveness but can also play an important role in mitigating the negative impacts that such growth can generate. Recognizing the opportunity that this innovation can have in the tourism industry, this chapter analyzes the state of the art and systematizes the knowledge and evolution of the academic debate about this relationship between sustainable innovation and tourism from 1992 to 2018. This chapter indicates that sustainable tourism is focused on seven major areas of research and predominantly analyzed through quantitative methods. It is still an embryonic topic with scarce research done in several areas, such as the monitoring of its impacts, the effects felt by the communities of tourist destinations, and the impacts that sustainable innovation may have on other tourism subsectors.