The role of destination marketing organizations changed considerably over the past few decades. Today, DMOs are not only marketers of a certain area, but are also required to constantly develop new tourism offerings to keep pace with fast changing consumer demands and a volatile economic environment. The goal of this study is to better understand how collaboration with external partners contributes to organizational learning and successful innovation development. The authors studied American DMOs to evaluated the impact of organizational settings for innovation and collaboration on partnership-driven innovation. It was found that the assimilation of new knowledge is a key process to harness new knowledge resources to develop successful innovations.