Rethinking Tourism Education as Knowledge Hubs for Innovation and Capacity Building

Abstract

Tourist education is believed to support innovation, institutional capacity, and sustainable tourism development. However, tourism education still prioritises jobs and classroom learning inside the industry. There is yet unrealised potential for using tourism education as a strategy to foster long-term capacity building and research collaboration. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Knowledge Hub Model, a concept that rethinks the role of tourism education as a designed platform for systemic innovation in tourism ecosystems.The Knowledge Hub Model conceptualizes educational institutions as knowledge hubs that integrate adaptive pedagogies, capacity building, and research-oriented innovation activities into a continuous cycle of co-creation of knowledge. Ultimately, this final chapter shows how planned collaborations across students, academics, industry and the community may develop applied knowledge, improve institutional and individual capacity, and foster a culture of evidence-informed decision-making in tourism. It presents a new way to conceptualize the role of tourism higher education in easing the creation of tourism-related knowledge as an ecosystem of knowledge building rather than the linear accumulation of human capital. This paper also contributes to tourism education and management literature, presenting a conceptual framework and opportunities to develop future research.