What are the four measurable qualities of a creative person?

 

Creativity sounds like a metric that’s too subjective to measure. But it’s no strange topic to psychologist and creativity experts in the field.  Through over 50 years of psychological research, psychologists have found that you can accurately measure someone’s creativity using a psychometric approach.

We’ve developed an automated way of measuring your Creativity Quotient (CQ) through open-ended thought-provoking, outside-the-box-thinking exercises. Your CQ, which determines your ability to come up with novel ideas that are adaptive and applicable, can be assessed using four dimensions:

• Fluency refers to how many unique and relevant responses you can come up within a given time. Someone with high fluency would be able to conjure many different ideas, options and, therefore, more viable solutions to a given problem.
• Flexibility is measured by the number of distinct categories your answers represent. Flexibility is about generating ideas that are different from each other. Someone with high flexibility would be able to maneuver out of a “thinking rut” by coming up with entirely new ideas.
• Originality refers to how infrequent your responses are compared to others’. People with high originality can come up with ideas that are statistically uncommon, but still relevant to the problem at hand and possibly break-through ideas.
• Elaboration is measured based on how detailed your ideas and solutions are.  Someone with high elaboration is able to create detailed and intricate plans and embellish them with details.

Our CQ exercises have three sections—creative association, creative context and creative selection – each contains one to four open-ended exercises.  Grades are then rated on a scale:

• Fluency: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900)
• Flexibility: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900)
• Originality: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900)
• Elaboration: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900) (Note: Elaboration is still a work-in-progress and will be available in the next release)

The more unique, original, diverse and detailed ideas and responses you can generate, the higher your scores are.

SparcIt’s engine evaluates your responses using techniques in:

• Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP)  – which is concerned with interactions between human language and computers
• Semantic networks from Computational Linguistics – which is the form of knowledge representation that shows the relationship between concepts
• Computational power for statistical mining of large data-sets and corpora

What does my final score mean?

Scoring low in certain dimensions on the CQ scale is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, certain job functions need people who are more linear thinkers as opposed to divergent and original thinkers.

Our research has also found that doing exercises can actually improve your CQ, so like many skills, you can become more creative with practice. Contrary to the popular opinion that an individual is creative or they’re not, our data indicated that creativity can be learned. On average, participants who completed the study improved in both flexibility and fluency.

Furthermore, study results suggest that the statistically significant increase of one’s creativity was observed in participants who listened to more lectures (i.e., those who watched more lecture videos and learned from various researchers improved significantly compared to those who didn’t.) Other means, such as completing assignments also have an impact on one’s creative thinking ability.

Just remember, Creativity is like a muscle – you need to train it to get stronger.