An Intelligent System for Sequencing Product Innovation Activities in Hotels

Abstract

Touristic innovation is understood as the implementation of new or improved products, processes, organization and marketing practices, that consider the non-lineal behavior and the knowledge generation. Although the related literature globally establishes the activities that should be contained in an innovation procedure to obtain new and improved products, there are not definitive guidelines regarding the order that should follow the execution of this activities. The current research fills this gap by presenting a framework for sequencing innovation activities in hotels. Specifically, the framework at first introduces
the use of association rules to match the features of the hotel and the set of activities to execute. Afterwards, we propose an extension of the Borda rule for generating the sequence of the activities to execute, guaranteeing a trade-off between the generality and the singularity of such sequence. The paper includes the development of a case study to show the application of the presented framework in a real scenario. Finally, the paper concludes with the brief presentation of a software developed to allow the use of the proposal by the final managers in hotels.