Creativity Assessment and Organization’s bottom-line?

 

Earlier in the year, Adobe released its famous study on if creativity is important for company’s bottom line. The article can be found here.

To quickly summarize the study;  In today’s competitive market, what makes a company succeed are:

• the ability to foster innovation
• develop exceptional talent and leadership
• a high degree of brand recognition

The research’s key findings were, companies that foster creativity:

• achieve exceptional revenue growth
• enjoy greater market share
• win recognition as best places to work

There are plenty of rhetoric and hype out there about why Creativity and Innovation are important for companies and organizations and there is no surprise that Creativity is one of the greatest intangible in global business.

I couldn’t agree more with this article.  Unfortunately, creativity and creative thinking is not part of the core curriculum in our schools.  Furthermore, it is not measured effectively.  In fact, most scholars do not know that creativity can in fact be measured.

There are quite a bit of literature on how creativity can be measured.  Among the well-known approaches are the J. P. Guilford and Ellis Torrance’s approach that creativity can be measured using indices such as Fluency (# of relevant responses), Flexibility (# of categories of different responses) and Originality (infrequency of responses).  So far, such way of measuring creativity has been a slow and manual process.  But with advances in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is becoming possible to automate such process.