Sustainable Development Evaluation of Cultural and Creative Industries Using a Neutrosophic-Based Dematel–Topsis Approach

Nowadays, national governments and international organizations are increasingly interested in the sustainable development of the cultural and creative industries through the integration of culture, art, science, and education and their influence on local economic and cultural development and promotion. However, to the best of our knowledge, only few studies have proposed a comprehensive framework based on the multi-criteria decision-making concept for evaluating the sustainable development of such industries. The main purpose of this paper is to determine which criteria are important for sustainable development, how these criteria interact, and how the sustainability performance of the evaluated subjects can be measured. Four sustainability perspectives are incorporated into the framework, economic, social, environmental, and governmental institutional, and 17 evaluation criteria. In the methodology, the neutrosophic decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (N-DEMATEL) method is first used to identify the influential relationships between the sustainability criteria. Then, a modified technique for order priority by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is used to calculate the performance of the sustainable cultural and creative industries. Neutrosophic fuzzy logic is applied to reflect the ambiguity of the expert evaluations, with the three parameters of truth, falsity, and indeterminacy incorporated to obtain more potential uncertainty information for neutrosophic decision support. The validity and practicality of the proposed model are demonstrated through a real-world example for the National Museum of Natural Science located in Central Taiwan. The results show that local government involvement, policy promotion and marketing, and the promotion of concept of sustainability are the most influential criteria for sustainability in the cultural and creative industries. The research findings can be used to guide the long-term development of the cultural and creative industries for industry and government and the method can be adapted for other performance evaluation issues. Government agencies can use the model to encourage the development of the cultural and creative industries through financial support, promotion, and partnerships with other agencies using its resources and allocation capabilities.