4th INTERNATIONAL DOCTORAL TOURISM AND LEISURE COLLOQUIUM

Innovation is considered to be a key factor both for company competitiveness as well as for economic growth. If we consider that the weight of services in the most industrialized economies amply surpasses 50 percent in terms of GDP and especially in terms of employment, one cannot assess the issue of fostering economic growth without considering the role of services in the economies in question, and therefore, without knowing the guidelines and manners of innovating in the sector’s companies. Tourism has constituted, for the past several decades, a sector with significant and growing importance both in the European and in the Spanish economy. However, it is not until relatively recent times that innovation in the tourist sector has begun to be the subject of research studies. In this context, the objective of the present work is centred on drawing up a description of modes of innovation of innovative Spanish hotel companies using data from the Encuesta sobre innovacion tecnologica de las empresas carried out by the INE. We use factor and cluster analysis to identify five clusters that may be interpreted as specific innovation modes.