Cultural Businesses
11.13 Cultural businesses are those operating in a sector that comprises the following seven sub-sectors or domains as described in DCMS’s Data Evidence Toolkit: Audio-Visual; Books and Press; Heritage; Performance Arts; Sport; Tourism and Visual Arts. They are predominantly small and micro sized enterprises, many of which are non-VAT registered i.e. statistically ‘invisible’, self-employed and sole traders. There are a range of business models applied in the cultural sector from public sector organisations through social enterprises to those in the commercial private sector.
11.14 A smaller industrial grouping is referred to as the ‘creative industries’ where businesses are specifically based on intellectual property, being transformed operationally, and in market growth terms, by Information and Communications Technologies/ ICT, (Mercer 2004). Regional and sub regional surveys of cultural and creative businesses consistently show growth across the value chain of creation, production, reproduction, marketing, distribution and sales with some variations between sub sectors. Evidence of this sector’s significance to the UK and South West has led to publication of the DCMS Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy (DCMS, February 2008) and SWRDA’s Creative Industry Strategy (SWRDA, June 2007).