The relation between tourism and tecnology clusters and its impacts to the local development: a bibliometric study of scientific literature

ABSTRACT This paper intends to investigate the scientific literature on the relation between tourism and technology clusters (TourTech) in promoting local development on the databases Business Source Complete of the Online Research Databases (EBSCO) and Leisure Tourism Database (CABI) until the year 2014. With a mixed approach (qualitative and quantitative), the research is classified as descriptive and bibliographic. The strategy adopted for data collection used bibliometric criteria and the data analysis applied was content analysis. The results showed that there are some possible theoretical gaps to be developed: not only about the conection between tourism clusters and technology clusters for local development, but also the relation between tourism and technology clusters and their impact to promote innovation that can improve the local development and finally, how the investments to develop a cluster individually can impact on the development of the other.