Providing a Framework to Evaluate Creative Tourism Products Using Balanced Scorecard

Creative tourism was first identified as a specific niche of tourism as a tourism which offers visitors the opportunity to develop their creative potential. As creative tourism has developed, so the scope of activities and types of tourism covered by the concept has broadened. Recently it refers to 'knowledge based creative activities that generate meaningful intangible cultural products, creative content and experiences. Although creative tourism has a great potential to create value, but there is few managerial researches in this field. Therefore this research aims to provide a managerial framework for feasibility testing of creative tourism products. So this research aims to answer these questions: what indicators are necessary for assessing and introducing the creative tourism products? And what is the priority and weight of such indicators in balanced scorecard framework? The mix explorative methodology has been employed, i.e. in the first phase the qualitative content analysis as qualitative approach and in the second phase the fuzzy screening and fuzzy AHP methods as quantitative approach are used. The study population included university professors, practitioners and administrators in the field of tourism. The study has found that 56 indicators are considered important for feasibility study of creative tourism products. The importance priority of the creative tourism feasibility test model is as following: the customer dimension by 0.292, the customer by 0.279, the internal business process by 0.215 and learning and growth by 0.214.So the findings suggest that the creative tourism can be considered as a customer oriented tourism.