FN ISI Export Format VR 1.0 PT J TI An Exploration of the Service Innovation Gap in Swiss Tourism AF Merkle, Thorsten Knaus, Dominik Siegrist, Chantal AU Merkle, T Knaus, D Siegrist, C AB The pressure to innovate in the tourism industry is increasing. Increasing global competition, new challenges and opportunities in the field of digitalisation as well as the dynamic development of society challenge the players in the tourism industry to increase the competitiveness of their own company and the destination. The tourism industry differs from other industries in the tertiary sector in particular in that it is highly fragmented. This results in the necessity of coordinating heterogeneous providers for the provision of services to guests. The Swiss tourism industry is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which often face numerous challenges in terms of the commercial exploitation of products or the implementation of ideas. This limited ability not only to generate new ideas, but also to implement them, will be referred to as the "Service Innovation Gap". In our poster, we describe the procedure of an explorative study in the Swiss context with the aim of exploring and better understanding the Service Innovation Gap. Furthermore, we aim to identify success factors for the resource-efficient implementation of innovations in tourism SMEs in an action research approach together with the stakeholders. ER