Related Variety and Innovation: Evidence from the Tourism Industry

Evolutionary economic geography literature claims that firms with related variety relations' are more innovative than firms with only intra-industry relations and relations of unrelated variety'. This paper aims to explore this claim for tourism companies in Antalya. The main question is whether innovative hotels, restaurants, and tourism-oriented shops have stronger relations with firms of different but related sectors than with firms of the same sector and firms of different but unrelated sectors. This paper differs from previous research: (i) by bringing a tourism dimension to evolutionary economic geography literature and (ii) by employing a quantitative method of analysis (correspondence and chi-square) based on a firm-level survey. The findings show a significant difference in the relationship between company innovations and the two proxies for related variety, unrelated variety and intra-industry relations, namely investment behaviour and recruitment of personnel.