Paola M.A. Paniccia (Full Professor of Management). 

This lesson deals with the topic of tourism organizations’ evolution in order to understand how tourism firms can create and develop sustainable and innovative business models within and across destinations, maintaining them sustainable over time. The topic is complex and of key importance for competitiveness and sustainable development of many destinations and tourism firms, especially to face the challenges related to the strong negative impact of COVID-19 on tourism worldwide. Although academic attention to these models has increased over the years, the processes that drive them are still poorly understood. A general justification of this research gap is the lack of appropriate theoretical perspectives for an holistic interpretation of the complex dynamics underlying sustainable tourism paths (Bramwell, Higham, Lane & Miller, 2017). Accordingly, this lesson presents a co-evolutionary framework that allows us to explaining the intertwined evolutionary socio-ecological dynamics  of tourism firms’ and destination’s change underlying the aforesaid business models, and their key determinants.  This framework has been developed and applied by some management scholars (Paniccia et al., 2017a,b; Paniccia & Leoni, 2019) in the tourism filed showing its effectiveness in the interpretation of phenomena such as innovation and sustainability. In this regard, the lesson also presents evidence through ad hoc case studies. Through this lesson, the reader can acquire specific knowledge about the co-evolution concept and on the two main key benefits in using the aforesaid co-evolutionary framework to understand how tourism firms and destinations can progress towards sustainability. First, it allows conceiving sustainable and innovative business models in the tourism sector as a result of effective multilevel co-evolutionary adaptations, according to a holistic and dynamic view of sustainability. Second, it allows to provide entrepreneur and policy makers with valuable tools to enhance the destinations’ identities through the propagation of the aforesaid business models, thus positively affecting the competitiveness of the destinations where they are located.