Tourism Entrepreneurship – Review and Future Directions

Entrepreneurship has received increased attention within tourism research, reflecting the important role of entrepreneurs and new firm start-ups within the tourism industry for innovation and value creation. Although it is expanding, the literature on tourism entrepreneurship remains dispersed. It embraces a number of different issues, perspectives and approaches, and thus far, little congruent knowledge has been developed. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing and analysing the current literature on tourism entrepreneurship. We examine the development in published articles from 2000 to 2012 and discuss how the literature on tourism entrepreneurship relates to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature in terms of research questions, theoretical perspectives and applied methods. We differentiate between a convergent approach in which studies build on mainstream entrepreneurship theorising to examine the context of tourism and a divergent approach in which studies consider tourism entrepreneurship to be different from other types of entrepreneurship, thus needing specific theoretical insights. Trends reflecting convergent and divergent approaches are identified. Furthermore, we discuss potential contributions from tourism entrepreneurship research to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature and vice versa. Based on the findings from the review and analysis, we suggest future directions for research on tourism entrepreneurship.