Developing touristic destination: innovation performance issues

Tourism is one of the most developing branches of service sectors. The paper deals with a key area of a Central-Eastern-European country (Hungary) from the European perspective, i.e. tourism. Tourism provides a remarkable ratio of GDP, thus its importance is inevitable. Tourism destination management (TDM in further text) organisations are local building stones of this important branch. These organisations received remarkable development funds in the previous budget period. The aim was to turn tourism into a competitive and innovative branch. Quadruple helix model - approach to innovation systems provides the opportunity to include the fourth helix - the media-based civic society - into the innovation performance, thus its performance influences the efficacy of the given innovation system. The paper assumes that these TDM organisations, as media-based civil organisations, appear as enterprises that are responsible for touristic innovation performance. The research objective is to prove, or deny that these institutions are important workshops of innovation. A survey research was conducted. In the meantime, feedback was collected about the structure, comprehensiveness and the logical structure of the questionnaire. Cooperation characteristics, the correlations between the innovation performances, the factors generating innovation and the reason for innovation are presented. The results of the study can be used by the state-governed tourism management, the vocational organisations and the Hungarian Tourism Ltd. in the process of establishing the framework of calls, and operational models in order to make international comparisons (with other countries).