Tourism Research should talk with industry…NOW!

This week I had the pleasure of meeting Prof. Frank Go from Rotterdam School of Management. Prof. Frank Go has been the advisor of Elena during her 1 month experience abroad thanks to the shadowing program of our University. Prof. Go stayed with us for less than one day giving one guest lecture (**picture**) and for a lunch.

The guest lecture, in a really crowded room (around 60 students and researchers) has been really in line with some of our topics of interests (like for example eLearning). But what surprised me a lot was our conversation during lunch at Canvetto.

Basically what prof. Go highlighted is that there is a misalignment between academia and industry; this misalignment is even more relevant in tourism because there is a thigh relationship between the two: the first cannot survive with the other one and vice versa. So there is a need of “interpretation” or in other words there is the need to create a language suitable for academia to speak with industry and for industry to speak with academia.

So far so good…I’ve heard these things also from other professors and I was trying to propose courses, reports, conferences to overcome the issue…But in reality, what this domain (tourism) really needs is something like a group of “interpreters”: wise tourism guys and wise professors able to throw their egos out of the game to challenge each other in this translation/interpretation exercise.

I am sure there would be lots to learn from industry, and I am expecting to learn a lot from academia within the next months.

The point is: or the converge happens now with the new generation coming into the game (throwing the EGOS away) or the conversations/interaction will be more and more difficult.

So the call for “interpreters” is OPEN…who would like to join?

kisses and hug