Tourism innovation policy: Implementation and outcomes

•Analysis of a tourism innovation policy programme in its implementation.•Top-down intentions selectively translated into bottom-up types of innovations.•Analysis of how mutually-reinforcing barriers inhibit innovation.•Significance of polycentrism in institutional arrangements for implementation.•Different policies to deal with innovation propensity and innovation intensity.

The paper opens the “black box” of tourism innovation policy implementation through an analysis of the Spanish Programme of Innovative Business Groups that foster innovation through hybrid top-down bottom-up collaboration embedded in clusters. The focus is on three main issues: process of policy implementation, types of innovation that emerged, and the outcomes and barriers. The findings show the contradictions of this hybrid model of implementation with mixed outcomes of successful collaborations and abandoned trajectories. The Programme has stimulated the ‘propensity’ to innovate resulting in different types of innovation but has revealed the existence of mutually-reinforcing barriers. Some suggestions for future improvements of tourism innovation policies are offered including the importance of polycentricity in effective policy formulation and implementation.