Get Ready for the Future of Tourism and Hospitality with the Smart Hospitality Wheel

Technologies have changed our world rapidly and have also reshaped the tourism and hospitality industry. Organizations need to innovate to fulfil their customers’ changing needs and wishes. Students therefore need to be well prepared to enter the changing working field. Since innovation is a must, they need to learn how to use their creativity to design innovative concepts, making use of technology and data. This process can be stimulated and guided in a creativity process using the Smart Hospitality Wheel. This wheel has been developed for education, but the results in this study show its effectiveness in the industry as well. This paper introduces the development and use of the Smart Hospitality Wheel; a tool to come up with innovative ideas at the start of a design process. It stresses the importance of the use of the wheel in tourism and hospitality to design competitive and innovative concepts, describes the research method, shows some first results, and explores contributions and further research. The design and use of the wheel combined with the unique combination of theory linked to smartness and hospitality, creates a novel tool to use in the creativity process to design innovative and competitive concepts for the tourism and hospitality industry.