A Path‐Dependent Dynamic Capabilities Perspective on Sustainability‐Oriented Innovation in the Dutch Hotel Industry

Hotels are increasingly pursuing sustainability‐oriented innovations that require the deployment of dynamic capabilities. Yet little scholarly attention has focused on the nature of dynamic capabilities and their microfoundations in this industry setting. With a qualitative case study approach, the current study makes two significant contributions to literature on sustainability in the hospitality and tourism industry. First, it proposes that hotels are embedded in complex systems that shape the evolution of their dynamic capabilities. Through shared practices, industry norms and rules that favor repetitive, exploitive actions, domination by incumbent hotels in sustainability‐oriented innovations encourages even new hotels to develop sensing and seizing dynamic capabilities that orient toward incremental sustainability‐oriented innovations. Second, building on prior theoretical links between path dependence and dynamic capabilities (Vergne and Durand 2011) and, in the sustainability‐oriented innovation context (Inigo and Albareda 2019), this study empirically demonstrates how path dependence on microfoundations can mean that hotels cannot move to the level of reconfiguring their dynamic capabilities that is necessary for redesigning business models in support of radical sustainability‐oriented innovations. In turn, this study offers practical insights for overcoming the path dependence of dynamic capabilities for sustainability‐oriented innovations. It highlights the need for managerial actions to build transformative paths that can engender built‐in, reflexive, non‐routinized mechanisms, consonant with the complex nature of radical sustainability‐oriented innovations.