Green travel list LAST call for nominations

Nominations for green travel list must be in by Saturday 9 April

When we think about innovation, the first thing that may come to mind is research and development, laboratories, people in white coats testing new products. Research into innovation has inevitably concentrated on the manufacturing industries, reflecting the lack of appreciation and understanding about the contribution that the services industries make.

Yet, innovation can take many forms. Innovation can take the form of new processes for delivering a product, new ways to market a product, creating new markets to sell to, new ways of pricing the product, new ways of organising the business or even new ways to describe the product.

Conventional wisdom would have it that larger companies have more money to invest into innovation than smaller companies, and better ways to ‘harvest’ knowledge and information – another factor weighing against the tourism industry developing a reputation for innovation. Yet, smaller companies are closer to the consumer, more nimble to implement ideas and so may be better placed to introduce new ideas quickly.

Potentially all companies can be innovative, and for tourism companies exposed to different ways of doing things in all the countries in which we do business, there are opportunities for new ideas that less international industries do not have.

Yet, it is true that the tourism industry performs poorly when compared to other industries – at least in terms of the official statistics. My colleague at the University of Surrey, Prof. Allan Williams, and Professor Gareth Shaw at Exeter, estimate that, according to government statistics, hotels and restaurants spend less on R&D per employee, than any other economic sector in the UK.  But the reality is that most tourism firms are actively innovating all the time. We can see they are being innovative in all aspects of design, even though this expenditure is poorly captured in the official data. Research confirms that businesses which innovate, including environmental innovations, are more likely to outperform the firms that don’t.

This is why we are pleased to unveil this year’s Green Travel List in conjunction with the Guardian newspaper and Greentraveller.com

We are looking for examples of innovation in tourism companies that are making their company more sustainable. We are looking for examples of companies who have brought new ideas in from other countries, from other industries, or who have developed something entirely new. We want to hear about examples where an innovation has led to a demonstrable improvement in the sustainability of the company. All the ideas will be considered by a panel of experts and the ones we feel are the most innovative will feature in the Saturday edition of the Guardian newspaper in May, 2011.

The tourism industry will have much to celebrate and it is important that the tourism industry does develop a reputation for being innovative. In a coming era of resource-shortage the tourism industry will need to develop new ways of getting more out of the resources it has available and to demonstrate to customers, governments and current and potential employees that it is an industry for the future and not one dwelling in the practices of the past.

Dr Graham Miller, University of Surrey

For more information on how to nominate examples of innovation, go to:
www.greentraveller.co.uk/blog/nominate-green-initiative-guardian-green-travel-list