Tourism Breeding Environment: forms and levels of collaboration in the tourism sector

Tourism, one of the largest industries in the world, has been subject to strong innovation in the last years. Main changes are due to the availability of new Information and Communication Technologies, which directly connect tourists among them and with service providers, and to the always more personalized supply of tourism experience. Such evolution may represent a driver of development for local communities if they are able to reorganize the territorial tourism offer around different pattern of collaboration. In this paper we propose an organizational model for a Tourism Breeding Environment, TBE, whose members are tourism operators of a regional area with tourist vocation. After discussing about which forms of collaborative networked organizations can rise from the TBE, we present a classification of the different levels of collaboration emerging in those forms