This study seeks to better understand the link of a tourism firm’s intellectual capital to innovation performance, empirically testing the mediating role of absorptive capacity and moderating effect of asset specificity. Findings from 217 Chinese tourism firms indicate that absorptive capacity plays a mediating role in the capital–performance link, and the effect of social capital to absorptive capacity is highest when asset specificity is at an intermediate level, having an inverted “U” shape. The result indicates that the effect of the human capital is “U” shape with asset specificity. Thus, the findings make a few new important insights to the tourism innovation literature and also offer a number of vital implications for tourism managerial practices.
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