Tourism and the blue economy – prospects for innovations and needs for cooperation

Abstract

Sustainable tourism is an integral element in blue growth as it supports economic development while protecting marine and coastal ecosystems. Innovation drives this, but tourism and related services in the Black Sea Basin are still insufficiently knowledge- and technology-intensive, which entails economic, environmental and social losses. The region faces challenges such as overdevelopment, pollution, waste, seasonality and limited knowledge transfer to create effective business solutions. This decreases the added value of the sector and makes its improvement over vulnerable to various global shocks. To address these challenges, the project INTERSMARTS seeks to improve the sustainability performance and innovation absorption of tourism and services via interdisciplinary research, networking, co-creation and holistic knowledge generation. This is achieved through establishing an open network for applied research, technology transfer and valorizing novel context-relevant solutions for smart and sustainable tourism and services. INTERSMARTS’ long-term goal is to change the traditional perceptions and to raise awareness about tourism as a knowledge-intensive sector within blue growth, fostering innovation. The project follows the quintuple innovation helix model, which integrates academia, business, government, civil society, and the environment to create a collaborative knowledge economy.