Managing sustainability-oriented innovation in services: proposal of a scale for the future of hotel companies and travel agencies

PurposeThe concept of Sustainability-Oriented Service Innovation (SOSI) has been recently suggested from a conceptual reflection approach in an attempt to integrate innovation and sustainability in services, being an emerging field of innovation in services. This study aims to propose a scale to measure Sustainability-Oriented Service Innovation from the perspective of the company. Because the whole is different from the sum of its different parts, we need to better understand the synergy between sustainability and innovation for the future of tourism companies.Design/methodology/approachUpon a literature review, we propose a scale and explore its dimensionality with data from 268 to 256 Spanish hotel and travel agency managers, respectively. The dimensionality of the scale for measuring Sustainability-Oriented Service Innovation is similar in hotels and travel agencies.FindingsFive factors emerge from the principal component analyses carried out: two dimensions referred to technological and non-technological innovation, respectively, and three dimensions labelled as economic, social and environmental sustainability.Practical implicationsTo guide managers towards their operations, the proposed scale is expected to inspire models to assess the impact of SOSI practices in such a highly competitive industry and to identify the most influencing dimensions on the future performance of the tourism company.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge, no scale has been presented so far that brings together the dimensions of technological and non-technological innovation, as well as sustainability from a Triple Bottom Line approach.