This study aims to determine essential attributes of sustainable service innovation (SSI) in the Taiwan hospitality industry.
By combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies while considering perspectives on sustainable management and service innovation, the present study extends the related literature on SSI and presents a new framework. The decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) analytical approaches are used to identify relations between dimensions and their causality attributes.
The findings of the DEMATEL result indicate that innovation diffusion has direct and indirect effects on dimensions of sustainable innovation and on organizational factors. Furthermore, sustainable innovation emerged as the most important attribute while the analytic network process analysis was used.
The critical dimensions identified in this study may serve as guidelines that hospitality practitioners or hotel managers may use when engaging in SSI.
Sustainability management is ranked the most important criterion of sustainable practice, which indicates that considerations of sustainability are necessary when hospitality managers wish to carry out a sustainability project in an organization. Furthermore, organizational capabilities were ranked the most important criteria among all organizational factors. This finding implies that the first step involves establishing a shared vision.
The current study integrates and applies Rogers’ (2003) diffusion of innovations theory (DIT) to identify how to facilitate sustainability through service innovation. In so doing, this study can add to our knowledge in the hotel industry by using the DIT.
