A Knowledge Supply Chain for the ICT-Enhanced Tourism Education

Since the 1990s, with the development of Information, Communications and Technologies (ICTs), and increasing attentions given to intellectual capital, there is an obvious shift from an Information-Based Economy to a Knowledge-Based Economy, which requires new ways to organize, develop and adapt higher education to meet the needs of the industry and community it serves by filling the gap between industrial needs and curriculum provision. The research in this chapter suggests it could be addressed by integrating the tools of Knowledge Management (KM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) to create a Knowledge Supply Chain (KSC). This chapter elaborates an experimental study of developing an e-tourism curriculum in Thailand, a world-class tourism destination in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), where severe tourism revenue leakage occurs due to the lack in desired infrastructure and skilled human resources. A knowledge supply chain is proposed to leverage and balance knowledge demanded by the tourism industry and supplied by higher education. The first section introduces the background, literature and associated tools. The second section explains how the proposed methodological tools are employed in the proposed knowledge supply chain.