Disruptive Innovation In Hospitality

Introduction

“We are living in an era of rapid technological change where innovation rates continue to increase exponentially.” (Liddle and El-Kafafi, 2010)

Innovation is critical for all types of industries to survive. This essay will give a thorough explanation of what innovation is and why it is so important to the growth and development of organisations using some hospitality examples. It will discuss three types of innovation that can be observed within the hospitality industry which include incremental, radical and a brief note on disruptive innovation.

The characteristics found in an innovative organisation have been integrated within two sections that go into more detail on how organisations can become innovative, how it should be

It is important firstly that management recognise the difference between the past and the future. In today’s technological world, organisations are constantly put under pressure to make their services better to keep up with what could be classed as a rat race. If they can’t keep up, they’re out. Innovation has become an incremental part of how organisations keep ahead of the race. (Riivari et al., 2012)

For hospitality organisations, it was not many years ago that the only form of booking was by telephone or estate agent. Now, if the hotels website at least, is not user friendly, it can have a serious negative effect on the amount of reservations the particular hotel manage to book. In today’s world, if a hotel does not have a huge appearance on e-mediaries worldwide, it gives them less advantage over the other companies who appear everywhere.

When the sales of a product or service begin to fall there are usually logical reasons, which can include prices being too high or better products released in the market. This results in the company having no choice other than to be creative and innovate. Organisations in today’s competitive markets must innovate to survive. In other words, innovation will create growth and wealth for the

Hospitality organisations can adopt either incremental or radical innovation strategies to improve the services they provide. A simple definition of these could be:

 Incremental innovations are small improvements slowly creating better services.

 Radical innovations are essential changes that represent the ground-breaking changes in technology.

(Knoll, 2014)

Incremental innovation is possible the most widely used strategy in the hospitality industry as it is the safer and easier way to make a simple product, service and process better. Incremental innovation allows hotels to actively grow and develop while keeping a fairly level playing field with their competitors.

Radical innovations are less likely to be found in the hospitality industry as it is particularly difficult to be completely unique. Apart from an extremely small percentage of hotels, for example, the Ice Hotel in Sweden which is unique, most hotels can’t possibly stand out at the same calibre therefore stick to incremental