Valuation of organizations in creative industries

The paper is primarily focused on culture organizations and the possibilities of evaluating entities involved in creative industries. Nowadays creative industries are an important part of the national economy and therefore should not be forgotten as a research task. The cultural sector is not as homogenous as the industrial sector. On the one hand culture could be described by thousands of definitions and there are many fields of interest on the other hand we can detect tangible differences among subjects in the criteria such as ownership and sources of funding.  According to Howkins creative economy consists of advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software, toys and games, TV and radio, and videogames. If a company is set up as a classical profitable unit, we are able to use classical techniques of determining the fair value. This problem seems generally solved, although we do not have enough experiences in the Czech Republic in this field, but we always have the possibility to use foreign best practices. The unclear case is coming with units whose target is not profit on the first place because their main aim is to protect, conserve, forward culture to the general public or preserve it for the next generations. The first view supports the answer that there is no need to determinate the value of such type of entity. This answer is wrong, because the wave of need is gradually increasing. It is coming together with the change of environment and with the historical shift. After the geopolitical shift at the beginning of 1990's these organizations were set up by private persons, 20 years passed and people are thinking about exiting the market personally but without eliminating the company which should go on existing. This is one incentive and the second is even more important, because majority of these organizations function with the help and ownership of public authorities. Transformation of contributory organizations to classical business units is being discussed. The transformation includes strictly legal steps followed by economic steps as determine equity, value, assets etc. This task is open and we stand in front of a solution.

The main aim is to investigate possible approaches how to valuate culture organizations in special conditions in the Czech Republic. Recommended foreign practices will be discussed and probably modified for special conditions to fulfil our needs.

* This paper is one of the outputs from the research project "Effective methods of support for small and middle-sized subjects of cultural sector in environment of national and European economy” registered with the Ministry of Culture, Czech Republic under the number DF11P01OVV024.