Abstract
In increasingly uncertain and competitive markets, small tourism firms are often pressured to in-novate across a diverse range of innovation types. Innovation diversity creates synergies in that capabilities developed for one type can enhance the outcomes of other types of innovation. This paper defines and examines innovation diversity, and its relationship with small and medium en-terprise (SME) performance. It then considers the role of uncertainty and dependence on tourism markets in this relationship. The paper is original in that it first finds that innovation diversity mit-igates the negative effect of uncertainty on performance, and second that this relationship is es-pecially strong in more tourism-dependent SMEs. Whereas most research on tourism innovation relies on cross-sectional data, this paper is methodologically novel in using longitudinal data col-lected from 358 SMEs over a period of 18 months.