Prosper pilot case study : Woodburn

D. Jacobsen; D. Carson; J. Macbeth; S. Rose

Prosper is a national tourism research project commissioned by the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC) and managed by the Centre for Regional Tourism Research, Southern Cross University. Prosper involves researchers from Southern Cross University, the University of Queensland and Murdoch University. Prosper aims to develop context specific and holistic models for evaluating the capacity of regional communities to use innovation as a means of harnessing tourism’s social, economic and environmental value. This document presents the findings from the preliminary Prosper case study conducted in the northern New South Wales community of Woodburn. The core of the Prosper program is a series of case studies of regional tourism innovation potential. Prosper is not designed to tell case study communities what tourism development they should undertake. Rather, the research allows increased understanding of the way tourism operates in these communities, and identifies potential challenges the community will face in trying to develop tourism. At the same time, it identifies some strengths that can be brought to the tourism planning and management processes in those communities. The key questions for the Prosper project are: 1. What structures in regional tourism management work best in different systems to create environments of innovation? 2. Where in the system (or external to it) do regional tourism innovations come from, and how can regional tourism managers recognise an innovative idea or action? 3. What techniques can be used to evaluate the impacts of innovation on dimensions of regional development? 4. What aspects of social, cultural, economic and political capital are important to innovation and strategic development? Like all research, Prosper will be of use to communities if there are local champions committed to taking the information and acting on it. Those champions will need to understand the way in which the research has been produced, and will view the research as one component of the knowledge required to inform destination management. This report contains the findings from the Prosper pilot study. It introduces the reader to the case study, Woodburn, with a range of descriptive information about the general township, as well as issues such as social and economic capacities and the tourism system. This overview then enables the report to present an analysis of Woodburn using a collection of innovation capacity contexts presented in the ‘methodologies’ report cited above. Emerging from the Woodburn case study analysis is a checklist of Woodburn capacity for innovation indicators relating to each innovation context observed during the analysis. The checklist will highlight the utility of the Prosper research approach by providing a resource to help better understand the regional framework and interrelationships needed for regional communities, in this case Woodburn, to engage in innovative regional tourism development. A glossary has been added to the rear of this report to help clarify any terms that seem unclear or ambiguous.

Prosper pilot case study : Woodburn

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