۱- Introduction

۲- Literature review

۳- Methodology

۴- The new product balanced scorecard

۵- Discussion and conclusions

References

Abstract

New product development (NPD) is a counter-seasonal strategy able to reduce demand fluctuations, especially during the seasonal tails. No previous study has analysed this field through the lens of balanced scorecard (BSC). This explorative paper contributes to this gap and considers two research questions: i) How is a destination NPD process operationalized using the four BSC perspectives? ii) What is the relevance and content of each perspective in this particular field? The study deploys a longitudinal analysis of the Skipassfree product, launched by Livigno (Italy) in 2007. Over a decade, this product generated a significant uplift both in terms of hotel guests (+108%) and ski company clients (+248%). The proposed framework is built around 22 codes and incorporates a fifth BSC perspective (the destination context). “Learning and growth” is the most significant perspective with “alignment” being a key attribute, which suggests the relevance of innovation and stakeholders’ involvement.

Introduction

The increasing competition in the tourism and hospitality industry (Go and Govers, 2000; Ritchie and Crouch, 2000) pushes destinations to carefully manage seasonality (BarOn, 1975), especially in alpine contexts (Pegg et al., 2012; Sainaghi, 2008). Possible strategies are usually centred upon a few drivers, including: price (Turrión-Prats and Duro, 2017), events (Connell et al., 2015; Getz and Page, 2016; Sainaghi and Mauri, 2018), NPD (Sun and Carter, 2009), and market segmentation (Sainaghi and Canali, 2011). While event management (Getz, 2008, 2012) and marketing strategies (price, market segmentation) are well studied, particularly in the field of hospitality, NPD has not evolved in a similar accretive manner (Chen et al., 2013). Based on a recent literature review, NPD is defined as the process from a conceptualized idea to market launch of novel or updated goods (Müller-Stewens and Möller, 2017). Sandvik et al. (2011) suggest that tourism organizations may not always have a formalised process for NPD, especially in the case of small-medium sized businesses. Many studies assert that NPD is strongly linked with firm competitive advantage, both in the general field of management (Barczak et al., 2009) and also for lodging companies (Skalpe and Sandvik, 2002). For hospitality firms and in the context of this study, NPD is usually deeply linked with the overall destination management (Sainaghi, 2006). Prior hospitality and tourism studies as reported in Table 1 were focused on: hospitality businesses (60%), followed by tourism destination (35%), plus some marginal articles that follow a combined approach (5%). Researchers have used the BSC mainly to measure performance, to develop strategy or to evaluate (in a broad sense) hospitality and especially tourism websites. Given the array of local firms, the implementation of a new product is a difficult task for a tourism destination (Haugland et al., 2011). A destination, can be described as a network (Baggio and Sainaghi, 2016) or complex system (Baggio and Sainaghi, 2011), where nodes are organizations and relationships among them are links (Sainaghi and Baggio, 2014, 2017). Furthermore, while each company produces and delivers its service or good, the customer perceives the destination as a single element (Buhalis, 2000). Therefore, a destination new product requires evidence of governance (d’Angella and Go, 2009; d’Angella et al., 2010). These observations illustrate the high level of NPD complexity and the need to treat this topic with a multi-stakeholder approach (Beritelli, 2011) and inside a “processual” – rather than a “content” – perspective (Sainaghi, 2006).