Correspondence: Lluís Prats, Management & Product Design Department, University of Girona, Alemany 4, 17071, Spain. Tel: +34 972419700; Fax: +34 972419709; E-mail: lluis.prats@udg.cat

¹has a PhD in economic sciences from the Toulouse University TLSE-I in France and a PhD from the Jaume I University in Spain. He is Associate Professor at the Tourism Faculty of the University of Girona, and a member of the research centre on innovation for the tourism industry (CRIIT).

²has a PhD in Management & Business Administration from the University Jaume I in Spain. Jaume is a professor at the Tourism Faculty of the University of Girona, director of the research centre on innovation for the tourism industry (CRIIT), and director of the research group Organisational Networks & Innovation in Tourism (ONIT).

³has a PhD in Management & Business Administration from the University Jaume I in Spain. Francesc-Xavier is a professor in the Economics & Law Faculty at Jaume I University, director of the research group on strategic alliances, networks and territory (AERT), and academic director of the postgraduate and permanent training at the Jaume I University.

Received 12 July 2007; Revised 12 July 2007; Published online 4 August 2008.

Abstract

The analysis of tourism destinations as territorial agglomerations, that is, industrial districts and clusters, has been given attention in this journal in recent years. In these analyses, tourist companies closely situated in a territory or space are claimed to benefit from available shared resources. These papers, however, do not focus on the key role that innovation and the relationships among actors have on the evolution of tourism destinations. In trying to close this gap, we use the notions of system of innovation and social network analysis, and apply them to the tourism industry, to introduce the Tourism Local Innovation System (TLIS) model. This model can be used to assess the innovation capacity of tourism destinations and, also, to design relational network structures that favour innovation. Finally, by using social network analysis methods to draw a destination's relational network map, we present the case of Costa Brava Centre (Mid-Costa-Brava) — the most visited destination in Catalonia, which at the same time is the most visited region in Spain — as an actual example of TLIS.