Case Studies and Templates

Exploration & Innovation

It is worth starting this report on Exploration & Innovation stating the main questions that most organisations ask themselves on a daily basis. What role does innovation play for today’s destinations and what does it mean to be truly innovative? Is it still possible in such a busy world and a world where consumers are becoming more and more demanding to become pioneers of new ideas and launch projects that will overturn the whole industry?

These are also the questions that shaped one of the sessions of DTTT Global 2019 in Helsinki. Together with Tourism Ireland, Switzerland Tourism and Visit Wales, a definition of innovation has been given, as well as some best practices on how to be seen as truly innovative across the whole industry.

In this report, it will be possible to explore how different organisations are thriving thanks to an innovation- driven strategy and how they are shaping the future of the destination they operate in. Moreover, some of the best methods and communities where it is possible to learn and acquire Design Thinking skills will be presented, as a reference of the good resources, whom everyone can access to change the way they operate.

A focus on Exploration & Innovation in your DMO

Being innovative means finding harmony in the noise of marketing and business management trends that everyone hears about daily. The first suggestion is to consider innovation as an overall approach you can apply to every part of your organisation and not as something separate from the rest of your ordinary operations. It is important to visualise innovation as the shift that will enhance the way you promote your destinations, create experiences and reach out to people, and the impact all this makes across the industry.

However, this does not happen overnight. It is a long process that starts with exploration, goes through ideation and development processes before it is possible to measure the success of innovative initiatives. This is the reason why exploration shouldn't be just a phase of a long process that brings your organisation to adopting some sort of innovative technology, but must be an on-going process that is carried out routinely, both within the organisation and involving external expertise.

Moreover, it is impossible to exclude the last tech trends when discussing how to invest on innovation. Technology for the sake of technology does not make sense and must not be considered as the ultimate solution for your organisation. Developing experiences through AR and VR sounds interesting and revolutionary, but may not be the best solution if does not fit in your destination offering and branding.

Only through regular exploration of what the industry has to offer and how this can have an impact on your organisation, it is possible to quickly detect the right potential opportunities and work on how to develop them to innovate.

How Innovation Takes Place

A new innovative idea may be conceived exploring something that is happening inside or outside the DMO: the first phase is carried out during the ordinary functioning of your operations, following your normal ‘business model’. It is developed through an initial research phase and by questioning and investigating different situations and existing methods for fresh perspectives and new strategic thinking.

Once this first explorative phase has been carried out, it is necessary to empathise and analyse the current situation. Data and insights can confirm what the initial strategic thinking is, opening the ideation towards a new vision and goal for your DMO. It may be necessary to collect different inputs and points of view, both internally and externally.

When talking about vision, it is essential to think outside the box, dream big. At this stage, it is important to aim high, in order to see positive change at the end of the journey.

Once the ideal scenario has been decided, it is possible to start implementing an actual innovation trial. The goal in this is to make a change, enhance the current situation, having a positive impact in the way the DMO operates.

Insights and inputs that have been collected in the first phases are transformed into actionable solutions, articulated through powerful creative ideas. These can include involving innovative brands, partnerships or co-creating products or services.

The moment the effectiveness of these innovative actions has been verified, it is possible to integrate them into the usual organisational model. In order to maximise this potential, it will be necessary to carry out evaluations and analysis regularly, measuring progress and performance.

Where to focus your attention if trying to be innovative

Innovation can take place in many forms; nevertheless, there are three main areas that may require innovative rethinking.

Organisational Innovation

Pioneering innovative methods, like applying design thinking or launching a co- creation projects involving different players of the local industry.

Product & Experience Development

Identifying new opportunities that can enhance the way visitors, as well as locals, can experience your destination, creating new lifetime memories, offering more support and ways to interact with the audience, challenging the status-quo.

Visitor Experience Innovation

Enhancing the points of contact with videos, gamification, engaging UX on the website and breathtaking content on Instagram and other platforms, to reach out to people while they are in the destination or maybe just dreaming about it. Refine the role and purpose of the DMO in the destination.

How to Measure Innovation

Before and after undertaking a process that gravitates around innovation, it is important to measure the success of the organisation. This is done by measuring the value of the positive effect or ‘capital’ in all its forms.

Economic - The wealth that is generated

Social - The level of connections and networking with the stakeholders or third parties of interest

Cultural- Is the DMO playing a revolutionary role in the travel industry or relevant sector?

Symbolic- Is this meaningful and does it have an impact on the destination?

These are four different parameters that can help broadly evaluate if the DMO is moving in the right directions or if the decisions made are not having the desired impact. It is important to think about this ‘wealth’ as a whole: it is impossible to be really innovative if the final objective is to increase the amount of over-night stays or redesigning the website; the aim is bigger and broader and greater factors need to be taken into consideration. 


Human Centred Design

At the DTTT, as well as in many other innovative startups and companies, Design Thinking is the key to unseal opportunities and never stop exploring new ways of growing. Design Thinking is a mindset that helps organisations develop new ideas and stimulate discussion amongst people. There is nothing controversial about it - it is simply a different way of generating new ideas and asking for opinions, that involves everyone's different skills and talents, with a focus on the final user.

Although it may sound confusing, this section of Chapter 12 of the Transformation Series will be completely dedicated to enlightening you about human-centred design, its fundamentals, user-focused activities and much more.

It is important not to be put off this by the seemingly open nature of applying Design Thinking, as any organisation, of any nature and with any kind of team, can embrace this process to change the mindset and outlook of the whole organisation, even if it does not seem worth being prioritised.

Relevance of Human-centred Design Thinking

Generally speaking, we are used to doing things following a defined structure and a specific system, with norms, guidelines, morale and responsibilities. This is clear just by thinking about the easiest example, the driving system: everyone is aligned following the same norms, respecting the same rules, and driving along prebuilt routes that will bring to where is needed. As soon as the structure, in all its features, fail to work, the whole system collapses.

But what is at the core of every system? Why is the structure built in a certain way? The purpose of the driving system is to bring drivers, bikers and pedestrians from A to B, in the most efficient way possible, as well as safely. This demonstrated that when building any structure or setting up any system the most important focus is to make it work is the user.

In a DMO, where the main focus is clearly the destination and its offering, it is sometimes easy to forget about who the users are, or internally, setting up new work procedures, it may happen that these do not consider talents and roles in the best way. It is time to move the attention from the system to the person in the system, no matter who they are.

In other words, it is not important how fast new ideas and projects come into place; what is really relevant, is how useful people will find it. Everybody has the potential to innovate and find effective solutions to their everyday challenges: this means that every member of a team can take part in envisioning what innovative initiative may take place in a DMO or in the destination. Yet, how design thinking will take form still needs to be further explained.

The Principles of Design Thinking

Design Thinking is based on the scientific method of Observing, Reflecting, Making. These phases are part of an established approach that is proven to be effective.

Observing is the first phase and should be carried out constantly. This is done by looking at the data and insights you have available to get a perception of what the current situation is like. In order to get a more detailed and complete overview of the status quo, it is possible to organise ad-hoc research, such as surveys, focus groups or other forms of research that will provide with further data to support the observatory phase. It is essential to observe people and their behaviour to find something meaningful; this is also called empathising.

For instance, it emerged that fewer and fewer people are visiting the visitor centre. Some data previously collected show that there has been a decrease in the number of visitors that turn to the visitor centre to plan their stay once they are already in the destination. Many factors can play a role in this: did they already plan? Do they use the website? Do they use third parties' resources? Do they still need a visitor centre? In order to answer all these questions, it may be useful to observe people around the visitor centre, investigate why they are there, as well as interviewing visitors on their opinion about the visitor centre.

Reflecting is the following phase: it is about giving sense to the knowledge gathered in the first phase. The main aim of this is to completely understand the insights and see how different aspects are related. It is the phase in which it is possible to try to give answers to the questions of the first phase. It is also about starting to discuss new ideas on how to implement the situation and solve the challenge that emerged during the previous steps.

The last phase of the method is about 'Making': at this point, it is possible to think about how to implement a possible solution, trying and experimenting what is the best way. Going back to the previous example, this can be the time to start thinking about how to attract more people to the visitor centre, which is also useful to gather their contacts and engage with them. A first, a very short-term solution could be providing visitors discounts or exclusive bargains when going to the visitor centre; on the other hand, a long-term solution could be the development of an AR itinerary around the city that starts in the visitor centre and goes to throughout the main attractions of the destination.

The Fundamentals of Design Thinking

The first thing that needs to be kept in mind is that design thinking has got nothing to do with mere design, and for this reason, it is not just for designers. Design thinking focuses on the experience of people and aims to improve it: it is an effective method to search for smart solutions to everyday problems. Applying design thinking, even the things that have been the same for a long time, and look like they cannot be changed, can be reviewed and enhanced.

The only thing someone needs to be aware of before starting a design thinking journey is what an experience is. As long as it is clear how to reflect on experiences, it is possible to understand the needs of people. For example, when in the DMO's office the staff are having lunch, they are not just feeding themselves, but they are spending time together, taking a break from the usual workload, sharing their opinion about new projects and maybe also secretly complaining about what does not work. This is the experience of lunch simplified. If the goal is to make the lunch break a pleasant experience for your team, it is essential to understand the team's needs. 


The first exercise suggested to make people feel at ease with design thinking is very simple and also a lot of fun. What it wants to prove is that everyone can think about experiences, who is involved in it and what are their needs. The exercise requires everyone to draw a vase. This will demonstrate that a vase is just a vase, a simple object that contains flowers, for example.

However, if everyone has to draw how they would like to experience flowers at home or in the office, the results will be completely different. This demonstrates that there are as many ways of experiencing the same thing as people that think about it because everyone brings in personal aspects and needs that will differ from those of somebody else.

As long as they can think about an experience, they can think like a designer: it is time to take up the role of Change Maker in the DMO. Design thinking is a mindset that helps improve the current experience of the people that are served, aka users. Three key aspects need to be kept in mind when design thinking: once again, the Focus on Users, the Restless Reinvention and the Diverse and Empowered Team.

A Focus on What’s Good for Your User

The first thing that should necessarily be considered is the focus on users. Problems that the destination, or better, the organisation, may have, are considered 'non-human'. However, these problems are primarily related to people.

To find a solution to the challenge being worked on, it is essential to focus on the Users that are affected by this problem. For example, Uber has recently installed machines at the airport to request riders without the need of the app. This is because many people did not have access to the network, or were not able to use the app for any reason.


Hence, it is necessary to assess who the users are and what they do in that situation, as well as collecting an overview of what they do outside that situation. It is also important to evaluate the current experience of this users and how it can be improved.


"A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved" (Charles F. Kettering); in other words, whenever stating a problem or a challenge that is meant to be discussed in a meeting, for example, use the following structure from the user's point of view: Our users struggle to achieve some tasks today because they have this limitation.


Objectives of Logistics the organisation Constraints

User's Needs

Of course, assumptions aren't allowed: to be as accurate as possible, it is essential to address any assumption by observing, learning and understanding design research to genuinely empathise with the users - as previously explained.

Restless Reinvention

Restless reinvention refers to an active process of on-going experimentation, testing and learning, to implement the solution of a problem through iteration. The prototyping phase is essential to verify the effectiveness of ideas, before launching the final version; every little step is important to change the status quo.

It is sometimes hard to come out with ideas that are truly innovative and go beyond ordinary thinking. To boost brainstorming, it is essential to rely on absurdity. The brainstorming process is one of the most engaging and involved parts of design thinking, where everyone is called to give ideas and discuss them. The secret of a successful brainstorming session is to prioritise quantity over quality in the ideation process to come up with as many ideas as possible. A sound recommendation is to write down the idea before saying it out loud: in this way, no one will comment it or criticise it, interrupting the flow of ideas.

Eventually, amongst absurd and ordinary ideas, something truly innovative will catch the attention and will be used for the realisation of a prototype. It is important not to be afraid of taking risks. Risks mitigate failure: failure is something that does not work simply because it did not excel or was particularly interesting. Taking more risks allows getting to the next improvement more quickly and cheaply, and for this reason, must be considered as an opportunity.

Diverse and Empowered Team

If people are important in the challenge that is being solved through design thinking, then the people that take part in the process are equally important. This is when the term 'Diverse Empowered Team' comes to place. One of the advantages of using design thinking is the chance to gather multiple and diverse perspectives.

No one is considered less or more important than someone else in design thinking. It is essential to break the silos - go beyond the hierarchy of roles and power gaps existing in the organisation. The origin of innovation lies in the mind of a group of people with varied perspectives who successfully make decisions together and work toward shared goals.

This principle applies easily to the everyday work routine: when in a meeting where the conversation spins in circles, it could be useful to ask every participant to grab something to write with, visualise thoughts and then take turns sharing. Innovative ideas are, indeed, discussed and built together. Or another example could be to hold a silent and anonymous voting session to expose everyone's viewpoint, in case the people in the meeting are not succeeding in discussing and sharing.

Another perfect method to make the most of the role of an empowered and diverse team is to build meetings and discussion around storytelling - as it helps the visitor to learn something about your destination, internally storytelling can be useful to build an environment of knowledge-sharing and open discussion.

Industry Innovation and Collaboration

Industry Development Programmes

An Industry Development Programme is a programme designed to help DMOs deliver a structured plan to support the digitalisation, growth and competitiveness of their tourism industry. The programme is built according to the destination's needs and can be run in a series of stages. The aim is to provide targeted action on specific needs, accessing challenges faced by SMEs of the destination on an everyday basis.

DMOs have the power to lead and transform their industry. Every DMO has also a responsibility to their industry, to help them develop and keep the destination competitive. As a DMO, it is good to align businesses that operate in the travel industry to align under your brand, recognising and becoming ambassadors of the core pillars of the brand, to help translate into strong brand-rich visitor experiences and expand the brand's social footprint through a coherent content plan.

If the DMO plays, or aims to play the extremely relevant role of leader and manager of the industry, it is extremely important that the challenges of small businesses are understood and addressed. Every tourism industry, even in some of the most successful destinations, is made up of a myriad of small and micro- enterprises, all working to succeed in their individual business ideas. With an acute understanding of the needs and challenges of micro-enterprises - often 'one man band' outfits - the DMO helps them with highly tactical steps they can take, as well as shifting mindset to embrace the wider strategic opportunities.

The first step to really get to know your industry is to assess the businesses and see how they rank according to certain parameters that the DMO can adopt from third parties or create from scratch. The aim is to audit businesses across a range of different factors, looking at all aspects of their business. This will allow a deep exploration of the industry's strengths and weaknesses, disclosing where opportunities to innovate lie.

Spending 2-3 hours with an expert, in person or a in virtual room helps businesses get access to direct support on specific decisions within their business activities. Expert advice and business coaching provide concrete recommendations to business about how they perform and on how to fulfil the expectations of the DMO. Complimenting assessments and coaching with a broader capacity-building programme helps you to provide vision and strategic guidance, followed-up with hands-on operational guidance.

The ownership of a programme led for the whole industry is essential to work on experiential travel - one of the biggest trends impacting the industry right now and a shift that DMOs cannot afford to ignore. Assessing, exploring, leading the industry through and towards innovative ideas will benefit the market and guarantee the sustainable development of the whole destination.

Collaboration with Innovative Businesses

As reiterated many times before, start-ups are key to develop the destination and innovate. Providing them with a space to innovate, like Paris and London are doing - presented below - is great for supporting the whole industry. Moreover, a regular look at some of the emerging areas where innovation is having an impact on travel, tourism and hospitality is essential.

There are various areas where it is possible to see a big change; just to mention some, innovation is creating a more seamless customer journey, as well as making it 'wow!', unique and outside of traditional expectations. Further attention is drawn on micro social networks and communities, reaching out to niche markets through a well-defined brand offer. Of course, sustainability plays a crucial role and many innovative businesses are committed to making destinations more sustainable. And finally, it goes without saying that innovation has a lot to do with technology, tools and platforms that benefit from the introduction of AI or blockchain. These are also changing the very essence of social media today with incredible new features, such as gamification.

Developing a Platform for Innovation in Tourism with Espoo Marketing

The Finnish city of Espoo is an ecosystem of collaboration and innovation, boasting a wealth of successful talent from large international corporates such as Nokia and Rovio (best known for the Angry Birds franchise), to growing start-ups with bright futures ahead. It is the largest innovation community in the Nordic countries and one of the six winners of the European Capital of Innovation Award 2019 (iCapital), alongside many other titles. For this reason, the city continues to attract budding entrepreneurs, pioneers and the like to its exciting hub of innovation and growth. To put this into context, at least one startup is formed every week!

For Espoo, it is all about growing for the greater good. Co-creating and collaborating with universities, companies and residents is the key element of Espoo's approach. Jaana Tuomi, CEO at Espoo Marketing, talked about the timeline of Espoo's Innovation Ecosystem and how the city actively nurtures sustainable growth together.

The destination is one of the most sustainable areas in Europe and, thanks to the close collaboration with the industry, a pioneer of sustainable development. Visit Espoo aims to develop the destination into a financially, ecologically, culturally and socially sustainable place, with the help of the most innovative businesses in the industry, who are committed and willing to grow sustainably too; of course Experiences and innovations are the frontier themes when marketing Espoo.

Innovation contributes to the achievement of the bold goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, and in order to so it is essential to have a strict relationship with the industry, boosting the collaboration with the most responsible companies. This reflects a lot the broader vision of Finland as a country where sustainability is at the heart of every activity and to stick to the Sustainable Travel Finland (STF) programme.

In the destination, it is possible to take part in sustainable events, and take advantage of sustainable services around the year. The city’s beautiful nature is an invitation to enjoy activities on land and at sea. Espoo is an innovative actor within sustainable development, and Visit Espoo, together with its partners, wants to be an integral part of this making the right choices and operating with the right methods. Espoo was the first city to join the Finnish Society’s Commitment to Sustainable Development. Its objective is to make Finland a wellbeing place that guarantees nature’s carrying capacity and is globally responsible.

In conclusion, Visit Espoo managed to bring open innovation spirit to the travel sector in order to develop a range of different services; it was a long journey full of challenges. Two separate worlds, such as tourism and innovation, have been merged and now coexist, allowing Espoo to be recognised as one of the most innovative centres of excellence of Europe.

Destination Innovation

It is impossible to present the topic of innovation without discussing the critical role that technology plays in it. Many technological trends are currently influencing the way we work, how we move around and how we exchange money. It does not matter if these technologies are not strictly related to the tourism industry; it is important not to forget that anything can be explored and a lot of innovations can be adopted in the destination. Technologies enable the future solution to the challenges that destinations are facing nowadays. These challenges can be related to sustainability, transportation, energy production etc.

In this section, we look at some examples of destinations that have applied technology for innovative ideas. These examples are unique and serve to demonstrate how many different ideas can take place in a destination with innovative design thinking.

Technology to Enable a Positive Impact in the Future

Over the next few paragraphs, some examples on how to be innovative with technology have been presented. However, technology and disruption have been further discussed in Chapter 10 of the Transformation Series.

Blockchain: Shifting the Behaviour in the Destination

Using blockchain it is possible to make tourism revenue positive by creating a visitor spending ecosystem which is tilted towards small businesses through local coins or loyalty-based rewards. Distributed networks built on blockchain can help increase security and protection of hoteliers from having rates reduced and their bottom line shredded away.

Blockchain can be used to create networks of certified businesses, whether by approval of a common distribution technology or influencing consumer decisions to choose businesses using a set coin or initiative.

Off-the-shelf solutions are available, making blockchain something that's relatively easy to get started with. Early ideas focus on currency and loyalty and offer great opportunities to empower smaller businesses and create a 'fair trade' or 'tourism for good' visitor economy.

As claimed many many times, the role of the DMO is not limited to engaging with visitors, but in order to keep a balance with the local community, it is important to engage with residents. Colu is a platform that helps cities engage with residents by rewarding them for taking actions that promote their strategic goals, using a unique City Coin to promote local spending.

Dynamic destinations are those that control their key institutions to help achieve strategic goals. The DMO can facilitate seamless collaboration among stakeholders around common goals in many innovative ways, and one is cryptocurrency. Amongst the destinations that are using this platform, there's Liverpool, which has created the Liverpool Pound, a city currency that is accepted by the main stores of the city centre and is used especially by millennials, and Bristol, of course, with its Bristol Pound, which is the UK’s largest local currency.

Finally, Colu allows others to create their own cryptocurrency, specifically designed for their destination. It allows four key outcomes for your destination:

Awareness

Engagement

Take Urban Actions

Keep it Local

Smart Tourism

A great example of an innovative way of thinking of innovating and becoming a smart destination is 5G- Enabled Smart Tourism in the West of England. Working with telecoms partners, the West of England has been considered 'early adopter' of this new advancement and a testbed or beacon for other destinations and attractions. The project has £8million of funding and is about multiple partners coming together to put this region on the map.

Smart Tourism Explored

Experiences

• Airbus A330 landing gear recreated in a VR environment.
• AR tech to see the Roman Baths through history.

Audiences

• Network slicing enabling better emergency response to unexpected incidents during busy events at Bristol Harbourside.

Brand

• Streaming of interactive VR content filmed at major Bristol tourist events (Bristol Pride, Harbour Festival) to multiple users wearing VR headgear.

Conversion

• Augmented reality app allowed visitors to see additional information about exhibits in the museum.

Facial Recognition

A further example of an innovative campaign that uses an exceptional type of technology is the Hawaii Tourism Authority's initiative "Discover your Aloha". This a campaign integrating facial recognition technology, that will allow to recognise the moment in which the viewer smiled watching an amazing video about the destination. As the video plays, then custom-built facial recognition software analyses the physical reactions to the content and identifies which footage evokes the most positive reaction from the viewer. The algorithm identifies the personal preferences of each viewer and pairs them with their ‘Aloha’ represented by animal guide of significance to Hawaiian culture, including Iwa (Bird) the all-knowing guide, He‘e (Octopus) the loving spirit and Pua‘a (Pig) the bold adventurer.

At the end of the viewing, the audience will then have the chance to book a personalised Hawai‘i holiday with discounts of up to 50%. The campaign ran in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand on Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity and Wotif sites throughout the year.

Tips for DMOs

So far, this Chapter has provided some theory and heaps of examples to get some inspiration before starting the journey towards innovation. But how can a DMO concretely undertake an innovation process? What are the goals and expectations?

The first recommendation is that the organisation always stays up to date with exploration. This means that every DMO should dedicate some time in exploring new trends and technologies, collecting insights on what is happening in the market. This will allow an on-going flow of inspiration entering the organisation and boosting the creativity of teams.

What simple steps can you take to make your work more creative?

Here are some DTTT recommendations on how to boost exploration and become more innovative in the DMO.

How do we encourage regular knowledge exchanges?

If there are people dedicated to research, it would be great to run regular meetings and presentations about the most intriguing insights in the market, or maybe just to present and discuss a case study that seems rather interesting.

How can we involve the team?

Considering the importance of involving a diverse and empowered team to collect different perspective, an interesting idea is to run sprints and brainstorming sessions within the team. This will allow room for exploration and ideation inside the organisation.

How do we tackle a new challenge?

In the hypothesis of a challenge the DMO is facing, why not running a design thinking session, to tackle the challenge and ideate together on possible solutions. This is a great way of innovating, piloting and experimenting with various solutions that, in the long run, will allow a more comprehensive implementation.

How do we keep track on innovation?

If a lot is going on in the DMO and it is hard to keep track of the development: an ideal scenario would include the creation of an 'innovation board', an actual canvas where people can interact and monitor the progress of activities. This board can be either digital or concretely exist in the office, maybe on the wall of a common space. This board can be divided into different vertical sections, one for ideas, one for short-term actions and one for long term actions. Moreover, it will be possible to write down deadlines, updates and notes about what is progressing and what is not. Having a visual representation of what is happening in the organisation will help keep the awareness of what is going on high, motivating the staff to explore something new or express new ideas.

What if we are stuck in the same ideas?

Sometimes it is hard to leave space for innovation and let new ideas flow during the ordinary and daily operating of the organisation. In this circumstance, it is probably better to rely on external parties. This will help gather insightful ideas from the market and diverse and impartial opinion on things. At the DTTT, complete design thinking programmes are available to be run in every DMO. These include ad-hoc workshops and templates to carry out a complete design thinking programme as well as exclusive meetings to boost innovation and gather precious insights to give a fresh start to the journey that can boost the development of the DMO.