Innovation Labs for Digital Transformation Strategies and Business Model Innovation in the Digital Age: a Focus on Tourism and Cultural Sector

The research proposes the Innovation Labs as a valuable management initiative to support tourism and cultural organisations in developing Digital Innovation Capacity, fostering Digital Transformation (DT) and Business Model Innovation (BMI). Innovation Labs are innovation management models aimed at fostering creative and critical thinking, driving the organisation in finding the best ways to generate knowledge and digital culture, introduce technologies, digitise operations, and implement digital strategies for continuous and sustainable innovation paths (Santarsiero et al., 2019; 2020). The need for investigating and identifying possible solutions, and governance models, in terms of management initiatives that follow emergent innovation trends, and support tourism and cultural organisations in embracing digital innovation journeys, is having a growing interest, both in scholars and practitioners, especially after the pandemic Covid-19. Tourism and cultural organisations, pursuant their attitude to be a labour-intensive production sector, in which the competitive advantage depends on the differentiation of the tourism product and the humanisation of the offered experiences, resulted as one of the sectors that most repudiate DT, conceiving it as a process that would lead to standardisation and loss of appeal to the end customer. However, nowadays, due to the emerging challenges in the Digital Age that are also affecting the tourism and cultural sector, the need for embracing digital journeys favouring DT and BMI should be considered mandatory to guarantee competitiveness and the gain of a sustainable competitive advantage. The rapid development of digital technologies and solutions, and their democratisation, induced changes in consumers’ and users’ habits and behaviours, resulting in the need for developing new products, services and methods of use based on emerging market needs. In the same way, organisations are asked to become resilient, proactive and able to evolve in the same way the competitive landscape does. After Covid-19, besides, the needs for digital innovation journeys and digital revolutions are even more accentuated, confirming that the pandemic has acted as an accelerator of DT dynamics. The competitiveness and attractiveness of organisations and destinations will therefore depend on the digital innovative capacity and ability of operators and destination managers to rethink the tourist offer according to the new emerging trends and context dynamics. Although the need for embracing digital innovation journeys is crucial, it is not an easy process to manage and exploit. Organisations, indeed, experience several difficulties and innovation barriers. In SMEs, in particular, which represent a typical configuration of tourism and cultural organisations, resistance to innovation, and insufficient skills, finance, culture, attitudes, and often also the time to devote to innovation due to overburden of bureaucratic aspects and various routines, are particularly accentuated. It follows these organisations require forms of support to face these needs and develop an innovative capacity, fostering DT and BMI to improve offers, competitiveness, efficiency, as well as customisation and customer relationships. Despite the relevance of these topics, however, the search for solutions and ways to support tourism and cultural organisations in embracing digital innovation journeys has not structurally explored yet. On this vein, the research aims to explore and investigate, in the field of innovation management, models and approaches to face DT and BMI challenges and opportunities, and thus to investigate the emerging phenomenon of Innovation Labs to understand their management model and assess their suitability for tourism and cultural organisations. In the theoretical section, the study presents a systematic literature review of Innovation Labs to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and identify critical patterns according to two main dimensions of analysis: space & infrastructure, and strategy & management. Furthermore, the study utilises a multiple-case study approach to better enrich the insights gathered from the literature, and to propose an Innovation Lab’s working definition and a management framework. The working definition takes into account all the emerging aspects, the new principles and paradigms that are governing the field of innovation management and that become essential for the organisations competing in this scenario. The framework describes key phases and relevant issues for effective management of Innovation Labs as catalysts of DT and BMI. Then, the research applies the proposed framework through an Action Research (AR) project involving an organisation operating in the tourism sector, to assess its efficacy in fostering tourism and cultural organisations’ digital innovation journeys. The research contributes to enrich knowledge and build theory in the field of Innovation Labs and tourism innovation management. In particular, the study led to developing theories on the contributions of Innovation Labs in fostering DT and BMI in tourism organisations. A further framework explaining the business model’s dimensions on which DT processes impact thanks to these initiatives has been proposed. Lastly, the analysis of the AR project compared Innovation Labs’ management framework with change management frameworks to detect alignments and to highlight insights to support researchers in considering the model as a tool to support innovation dynamics in times of crisis. This research also has relevant practical implications since it provides managers and practitioners with an overview of the dimensions to be considered while designing and managing an Innovation Lab to develop digital innovation capacity and foster DT and BMI. Expressly, managers and practitioners are provided with a framework supporting them designing and exploiting management initiatives aimed at embracing digital innovation journeys to generate marketable digital solutions, improve performance and develop a mindset continuous learning and innovation. The study also reveals some limitations that may address future research. Further empirical, also quantitative, investigations could be developed to extend the sample and to allow a comprehensive validation of the Innovation Lab’s management framework, focusing the research also on the evaluation of Innovation Labs’ activities.