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Top1. Introduction
In context of the global digital transformation and its resultant impact on all sectors of the economy, fostering, nurturing, and applying innovation represent the key challenge, the key imperative and the key source of growth and development across industries. Against this backdrop, the tourism industry, traditionally associated with old-style mobility consistent with moving from one place to another, and requiring relatively little technology, stands out to lose or to gain the most (Corvello et al., 2022; Valeri & Baggio, 2021). Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdown, and hence severe restrictions to local and international mobility, suggest that -- against all odds -- new forms (even if temporary) of tourism activity, aided by social networking sites, virtual reality and other, were devised by the industry (Ntounis et al, 2021; Pantano & Stylidis, 2021; Mohanty et al., 2020). While indicative of the evolution of the business model the tourism industry embarks on, it is also suggestive of the trajectory of innovation that the tourism industry is likely to follow in the years ahead (Ahmad et al., 2021; Nave et al., 2021; Sigala, 2020; Koh, 2020). This issue, i.e. innovation in the tourism industry (Lelo de Larrea et al., 2021; Traskevich & Fontanari, 2021), has several facets and should be explored from a variety of perspectives (cf. Troisi et al., 2021; Malik et al., 2021), including the supply side (consistent with the product, product design, product delivery, the vendors, the ways of reaching and communicating with the consumer) and the demand side (consistent with the evolving consumer profile, expectations, propensity to use technology, preferred destinations, preferred forms of tourism, preferred seasons, duration of travel etc.). In other words, not a single aspect of the long value-chain upon which tourism industry is built remains immune to the global digital transformation (Cuomo et al., 2021; Abbasian Fereidouni & Kawa, 2019). What follows is that any discussion on innovation and innovation management in the tourism industry needs to consider developments on the supply and on the demand side of service delivery. This paper inserts itself into this discussion by examining how innovation is fostered in the specific context defined by the hotel industry.