Chapter 1: Introduction: Tourism Knowledge Transfer

Tourism is an essential component of contemporary life in countries worldwide and like many aspects of modern society, is challenged by unprecedented change and disruption. People everywhere are struggling to meet the global challenges of climate change, development, and participatory governance. Many developing countries are facing loss of their traditional culture, language, architecture, and social structures. These challenges indicate that the tourism industry needs an adaptive strategy such that it can contribute to global sustainability and progress. This measure is to supplement the industry’s ability to create and acquire knowledge. Specifically, its transfer denotes how knowledge and ideas move from the sources to the potential users of that knowledge. Over the last decade, the meaning of knowledge transfer has widened to encompass the collaborative and iterative nature of its creation and exchange, by including concerns about the dynamic processes by which it is co-created and exchanged across disciplines and organizational boundaries. In the emerging knowledge-based society, the ability to transfer it within and between tourism organizations has been found to contribute to their innovativeness and competitiveness.