Thinking Technological Hubs for Development Strategies: Assessing How Value Chains Converge on Tourism Activities

Abstract

This paper proposes that Tourism Activities can be considered as a technological hub. We will discuss the implementation of the Value Chains Framework in the analysis of the products, services and infrastructure re- lated to tourism activities. The main idea consists of presenting an in- tegrated and systemic perspective of the economic processes related to tourism, which may lead to develop strategies able to foster productive linkages from a novel perspective. The hipothesis of this work is based on the common dialogue between litereature on supply characteristics and value chains, aiming to generate a comprehensive systematization of re- cent ideas to contribute to the consilitation of the concept of value hub. The main proposal, hence, consists on the elaboration of an analytical framework able to integrate a systemic approach for the tourism analy- sis, with a particular emphasis in its economic impact for local develop- ment. The paper proposes that Tourism Activities can be interpreted as a “technological hub”. As such, it unfolds the relation among different value chains that wouldn’t be connected by other forces -specially techno- logically driven ones-, nurturing efforts to generate innovation activities, product differentiation, and implement other development strategies.