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Collaborative research on industry issues
This article aims to present a succinct response to the strategic question: "The hospitality and tourism industry in Canada: what are the main challenges and solutions?" To identify key industry challenges and to search for practical solutions, Canadian hospitality and tourism educators collaborated with industry practitioners. From this endeavour, ten key initiatives, such as roundtables and forums in Canada during the past 15 years, which brought industry leaders and academia together, led to 50 academic papers (Jayawardena et al. , 2017). The current volume - the Worldwide Hospitality Themes (WHATT ) theme issue (v.9, n.4) - on the hospitality and tourism industry of Canada is the latest attempt to bring industry leaders and academicians together to identify possible solutions to key industry challenges. Among the 25 Canadian authors who contributed to this theme issue, 6 authors are industry leaders, 5 are university educators and 14 are college educators. Within this writer composition, 80 per cent are dual professionals, having spent many years in both industry and academia. More than half of these authors hold doctoral qualifications or are in the final stages of completing doctoral study. Further, this author group has extensive experience in managing, operating and teaching all aspects of the hospitality and tourism industry and can be categorized as follows:
* 19 per cent in senior leadership industry positions;
* 48 per cent in operational industry positions;
* 6 per cent in post-secondary education leadership positions; and
* 27 per cent in teaching positions in post-secondary education.
Organizing such a diverse group of busy professionals so that they could contribute to this project was challenging, and this article highlights the main outcomes of the articles contained in this theme issue as follows:
* the state of the industry (introductory article);
* finding innovative solutions for HR challenges (four articles); and
* new trends and innovation (four articles).
The state of the industry
Three authors (with experience as dean/five-star hotel's general manager (GM), academic chair/restaurant franchisee and professor) of the first paper in this theme issue, look at the state of the industry and lay a foundation for the other nine articles to follow (Jayawardena et al. , 2017). Canada's travel and tourism industry is performing well;...