The influence of knowledge distance and academic experience on tourism scholars' creativity

We examined the influence of a tourism scholar's cooperation network and knowledge distance on his or her creativity. We integrated the 2 critical attributes of tourism scholars’ cooperation networks, namely, accessing diverse knowledge and cooperative opportunities, by analyzing hand-collected samples of 988 publications from tourism scholars in a highly competitive academic environment at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The results showed that, with scholars in tourism and hospitality departments working in cooperative activities to generate ideas, moderate knowledge distance across universities and countries provided the best conditions for, and demonstrated the highest level of, creativity. Further, academic experience strengthened the relationship between knowledge distance and overall creative performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.