In Search of Horizontal Government: Insights on joining up municipalities

Research Question: Our base of the research was the social capital and its impact on the recognition of the opportunities to innovate the tourism products by invigorating the innovative culture of tourism structures in Slovenia and stimulating the collective cooperation of the tourism stakeholders on the global market. Purpose: Our goal is to make clear the role of the civil society, private enterprises, and organizations from public sector and small entrepreneurs in the creating of social capital, which is the base for the innovation of joint tourism products. Our aim was to identify the factors that stimulate the collaborative networking. Method: We investigated the cooperation networking between the tourism stakeholders with qualitative method of analysis. We conducted eight non structured interviews with tourism stakeholders and thirteen semi-structured interviews with the managers from various tourism organizations. Results: The results show that the right organization of consortium activities has the real impact on the creating of new tourism products. The results also show that the collaborative networking in the form of consortium supports the innovative processes and enables the marketing of the integral tourism products. Organization: The successful networking bases on the means of activation of the social capital, which enables the inclusion of the right stakeholders in the process of creation, translation, and implementing of the innovative ideas in the innovation process. Tourism structures in this process create various consortia form of collaboration and support in the process of acquisition of resources in the process of connecting the know-how, and in the process of the implementation of the same know-how to build the innovative tourism products. Society: Collaborative networking creates innovative culture of the tourism structures and the other structures in the society. The outcomes of the research show that Slovenian tourismscapes need different formal and informal structures of collaboration like various kind of consortia that empower social capital and enable the continuous generating of new innovative products in tourism sector. Originality: Conditional paths that are in the core of the collaborative networking develop the new gaze on the innovative agency by replacing the rigid and static planning of collaboration in tourism. The model originally develops new ways of the coordination of the interests of tourism stakeholders that cooperate in the process of innovation of integral tourism products. Limitations/Future Research: The limitation is the timing of the gathering of the data about the collaborative networking. We did not conduct the longitudinal research and the research results and findings cannot reflect the processes of the collaborative networking. Future research should include tourism stakeholders from other tourismscapes, because tourism is distinctly international endeavour. The comparison between different tourismscapes would show the differences and comparative advantages between tourismscapes regarding collaborative networking and its effects.