User-Driven Innovation Concepts and the Cruise Industry

For the past 20 years, cruise tourism has seen impressive growth rates with an average annual increase in passengers of more than 7 %. These impressive growth rates however cannot hide the fact that the cruise industry is facing several external and ‘home-made’ challenges which underlines the importance of innovation in the cruise industry. The ability to innovate is crucial for the sustainable success of any industry. Despite the importance of innovation for the future success of the cruise industry and the tourism sector in general, innovation is an under-researched theme in the field of tourism research. Customer needs and user involvement play an important role in the innovation process. This should especially be the case in the tourism industry as consumers are very much involved in the production of the industry’s services. Over the past 30 years, user-producer interaction and its effects on innovation has been widely assessed and described, and several concepts of user-driven innovation have been developed. These concepts differ depending on the level of user initiative, involvement and ownership in the (new) value creation process (here referred to as user focus) and the innovation generation potential that can be derived from the respective concept. According to these two dimensions, a model is proposed that opens up a spectrum of very different forms of user-driven innovation. The potential of these concepts for innovation in the tourism sector and cruise industry in particular as well as the state of research is outlined. Concepts with a low or medium user focus in particular bear a lot of immediate potential for the cruise industry. Concepts with a high user focus can also be an interesting option, but they require a very open attitude towards innovation and further research to identify ways of how these concepts can be applied.