Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tourism organizations increasingly communicate and share their knowledge in exchange of new
ideas or practices, typically as a part of networked collaboration. The capacity to explore,
transform and exploit knowledge from consumers are not mutually exclusive, but are likely
complementary (Lane, Koka and Pathal 2006; Lichtenthaler 2009; Zahra and George 2002),
because 'their impact on innovation and performance seems to depend on one another'
(Lichtenthaler 2009: 827). Therefore, the synergy from the different dimensions of absorptive
capacity would lead to the benefi t that is greater than that of single processes. For tourism
organizations to be able to successfully co-create value with consumers, it is important to ensure
that all lower level capabilities are developed and synergized.
Assessing organizational capacity for co-creation among DMOs
As marketers and major contributors to the development of tourism destinations it is argued that
destination marketing organizations (DMOs) need to engage in innovation activities (Hjalager
2002). Due to their central role within their destination DMOs are orchestrators of innovation
(Dhanaraj and Parkhe 2006). This role is of particular importance for DMOs as they are merely
a hub for information and as such bring together destination businesses that with or without the
DMO can engage in the development of new tourism products and services (Wang and Xiang
2007). Indeed, recent studies found that DMOs do engage in the development of tourism
products and services that are new to their organization and new to their destination (Sundbo,
Orfi la-Sintes and Sørensen 2007), whereby this development often takes place in collaboration
with destination businesses (Zach 2012). It was found that working with business partners results
in tourism products and services that fi t with strategic and organizational goals as well as DMOs'
market orientation and ultimately lead to innovation success (Zach 2012). This supports research
by Wang and Fesenmaier (2007) that argues that collaboration between DMOs and destination
tourism service providers is critical for destination success.
Taking it one step further, Zach and Gretzel (2012) identifi ed the relationships that exist
between destination organizations due to visitor movements, suggesting that DMOs can
exploit business-to-business dyads in this visitor-activated network for new service development.
For DMOs it is thus important to better understand and manage information surrounding
and passing through them to identify opportunities for new tourism product and service
development (Cooper 2006; Hjalager 2002). For the context of online marketing it was found
that DMOs' absorptive capacity is a critical success factor (Wang 2007). However, it is yet
unclear how exactly DMOs can take advantage of engaging destination visitors beyond a mere
observation of visitor behaviour. To measure tourism organizations' capacity for consumer
co-creation, measurement items corresponding to Lichtenthaler's (2009) absorptive capacity
measures that are relevant to the context of consumer integration were adopted and reworded
to fi t into the study context of US and Swiss DMOs. After a consultation with four experts in
tourism and social media and a back and forth translation from English to German, Italian and
French, items with redundant statements in any of the four languages were excluded. As a result,
13 items were retained for this study.
Questionnaires were developed and integrated into a survey on a broader theme of destination
innovation and technology targeting destination marketing organizations (DMOs). All items
are measured on 7-point Likert scales with 1=Strongly Disagree and 7=Strongly Agree. The
survey was made available in English, German, Italian and French, and was distributed to
essentially all DMOs in Switzerland (225) and the USA (2,000) in early 2012. This results in a
total of 76 (Switzerland) and 183 (USA) complete responses, representing a response rate
of 33.7 per cent and 9.1 per cent respectively.
