Innovation and Knowledge Creation in tourism: Tourism@ as a Temporary Cluster?

The present paper focuses on an event called Tourism@. This major event gathers the main actors of e-tourism and is dedicated to the usages of ICT in the tourism industry. It appears as a unique international trade fair in Europe for start up innovative companies, high tech SMEs, academic research, as well as large multinationals. Since 2001, Tourism@' specificities lie in the fact that each year the event includes the organization of a competition rewarding projects for their creativity and commitment in developing and implementing either new technologies or new uses for the tourism industry. Tourism@ is analyzed as a specific empirical case of temporary cluster, i.e. a hotspot of intense knowledge exchange, network building and idea generation, related to the tourism industry. Two arguments support this choice. On the one hand, the tourism industry has been one of the most innovative activities related to the development of ICT. On the other hand, stated by Maskell et al. (2005), ‘identifying, selecting, approaching and interacting with new partners is a tricky and costly process' and, we think, even more in the tourism industry. Indeed, the tourism industry is structured by dispersed activities in nature, time and space that need to be combined and assembled dynamically, and gather actors highly distant in the physical as well as in the cognitive sense. Therefore, the analysis of a temporary cluster devoted to this ‘dispersed' activity is particularly relevant.The paper is structured as follows. The first section will define the tourism sector as a sectoral system of production and innovation, and will trace the constraints associated to innovation in this activity. It defines the temporary clusters as a unique locus to favor interactions and knowledge creation in these activities. Section two will present the Tourism@ case study; the methodology used and will develop the statistical analysis of the database. The paper benefits from an exhaustive database of the projects presented, allowing to build information on knowledge bases, technologies, uses and markets targeted overtime. The analysis of the database evidences that the Tourism@ trade fair, in the role of a temporary cluster, enables to develop or implement innovative solutions, supports technology transfers and backs the creation of new markets as well as the fostering of horizontal and vertical relations between stakeholders.