Knowledge transfer in a tourism destination: the effects of a network structure

By Rodolfo Baggio, Chris Cooper. 2009

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tourism destinations have a necessity to innovate in order to remain competitive in an increasingly global environment. A pre-requisite for innovation is the understanding of how destinations source, share and use knowledge. This conceptual paper examines the nature of networks and how their analysis can shed light upon the processes of knowledge sharing in destinations as they strive to innovate. The paper conceptualizes destinations as networks of connected organizations, both public and private, each of which can be considered as a destination stakeholder. In network theory, they represent the nodes within the system. The paper shows how epidemic diffusion models can act as analogies for knowledge communication and transfer within a destination network. These models can be combined with other approaches to network analysis to shed light on how destination networks operate, and how they can be optimized with policy intervention to deliver innovative and competitive destinations. The paper closes with a practical tourism example taken from the Italian destination of Elba. Using numerical simulations, the case demonstrates how the Elba network can be optimized. Overall, this paper demonstrates the considerable utility of network analysis for tourism in delivering destination competitiveness.† †An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the IASK Advances in Tourism Research 2008 Conference, Aveiro, Portugal, 26–28 May 2008.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/463d33660442cf5baae169e3e5f5193da386dadf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Chris Cooper
2. N. Scott
3. Rodolfo Baggio
4. O. Bulanova
5. Sølvi Solvoll
6. Giacomo Del Chiappa
7. G. Alsos

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Rodolfo Baggio
2. N. Scott
3. Chris Cooper
4. R. Yuan
5. Jinwen Tang
6. Hengcai Zhang
7. Teemu Makkonen
8. Naixia Mou

Citations in the corpus

• Knowledge transfer in smart tourism destinations: Analyzing the effects of a network structure (2015, background): “Despite that, academic research has sparingly examined and discussed how this process can occur and how it can be assessed, measured and predicted (Baggio & Cooper, 2010).”
• Exploring spatio-temporal changes of city inbound tourism flow: The case of Shanghai, China (2020, background): “…Miguéns and Mendes (2008) build a global travel network and discuss the importance of tourist area weights to global travel network connections, Baggio and Cooper (2010) use complex network analysis methods to study the competitiveness of tourism destinations, while Wu et al. (2018) introduce…”
• Tourism Entrepreneurship – Review and Future Directions (2015, background): “…can also be gained from the service network literature within tourism which conceptualises destinations as networks of connected organisations (Baggio & Cooper, 2010), and which describes how a group of small firms organised in interdependent systems can be self-governing and together develop…”
• Improving tourism destination governance: a complexity science approach (2010, background): “They also show, however, that the increase in speed is much higher when the clustering coefficient of the network is increased by simulating a reconfiguration of the linkages (Baggio and Cooper, 2010) and provides a basis for intervention.”