The tourism cooperatives appeared in the early sixties to meet a new mass phenomenon that exerted excessive pressure on travel agents to be supported individually. Their constant evolution, in parallel with that of the tourist destinations and also with the needs of the tourists, is transforming these cooperatives and directing them forcibly towards more advanced strategic phases. These are the new phases, along with the new concepts of management of destinations, which require the greater emphasis on innovation capacity generated by cooperatives over tourist destinations without these developed structures. This paper explains the basic reasons that cooperatives can access these advanced strategic phases, increasing its capacity for innovation. This result is the product of research findings on “Managing destinations” of the research group “Organizational Networks, Innovation and Tourism (onit)” of the Faculty of Tourism at the Universidad de Girona, 2011.