In search of co-creation experts in tourism: a research agenda

Experience innovation through co-creation is crucial for the competitiveness of tourism businesses. Exploiting technology for enabling and managing experience within a space of co-creation can significantly increase value for consumers. Although this is becoming well documented in academic literature, a look at the tourism industry, however, often paints a quite different picture, with managers listing a plethora of reasons why academic views lack external validity. This knowledge exchange issue between academia and the industry may stem from academics’ often tenacious egalitarian view on expertise and the industry’s often obsessive cost controlling culture and occasionally outdated understanding of jobs as functions. In this paper, we argue that engaging and developing experience-space experts and technology-for-service experts can enable organizations to take advantage of great opportunities to co-create experience and value for all stakeholders. Building work and educational environments for these experts to develop is crucial for the competitiveness of tourism businesses.