Abstract
Innovation in tourism is a response to the growing public demand to live a long life, remain healthy and retain beauty and good
form. The main goal of the paper is to create a theoretical model of the health tourism innovativeness system. The paper is novel
in character, since to date the innovations occurring in health tourism have not been classified and there is no model of this
innovativeness. The article presents the results of an expert poll, which was carried out in two rounds using the Delphi method.
The result of research is construction of three different models of health tourism innovativeness. The paper fills the gap in the
theory of management science.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Peer-review under responsibility of Kaunas University of Technology, School of Economics and Business.
Keywords: Innovation; Health tourism; Innovativeness system; Managing of innovativeness.
Introduction
The open economy poses large sets of challenges in the management of contemporary business. The speed of
innovation results from the emergence of new networked business models for competitiveness and innovation. The
new emerging forms of business organisation require reconsideration of the dynamic capabilities, innovation
strategies of the firms and other management issues.
The research problem discussed in this paper is health tourism innovativeness system. Health tourism is defined
as a type of tourism the main goal of which is to improve or preserve health (Boruszczak, 2010). The earlier studies
by the Author (Szy