La eco-innovación en las empresas mexicanas de alojamiento turístico

Abstract

Eco-innovation is shown as one of the great challenges of the tourism industry given the growing connection between environmental quality and its good performance. Although the tourism literature has considered the topic of business sustainability in broader terms, the notion of eco-innovations represents a new field of research with studies that still investigate in depth the adoption of eco-innovations among tourism companies. This work addresses the conceptual evolution of eco-innovation to subsequently develop an analytical framework that tentatively explores this concept and its implementation in Mexican tourist accommodation companies through two basic internal characteristics of these organizations: their business performances and their respective sizes, measured in number of rooms. The methodology used has been the case method, making a set of case studies related to six hotel groups of purely Mexican capital through documentary evidence and structured interviews. The conclusions derived from the findings suggest, firstly, that eco-innovation is directly linked to the evolution of business results and the size of organizations and, secondly, that eco-innovation is perceived as a strategic bet generating comparative advantages for Mexican companies studied, independently of the signals issued by an ecologically aware demand and beyond the governmental regulatory actions.