Creativity Assessment

Abstract

Creativity can be assessed from four different perspectives—creative product, process, person, and environment. The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) is a popular method in measuring creative products in which expert judges in the domain in question rate actual products. However, in business, innovation or creativity assessment is largely limited to creative product and creative environment approaches, with less work on creative process or creative people. Because creativity involves the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment, it can be measured from other perspectives, too. Many creativity assessments concerning individual characteristics of creators have been developed. Amabile and Gryskiewicz identified eight aspects of work environment that could stimulate creativity, including sufficient freedom, challenging tasks, appropriate resources, and so on. A few tools have been created by researchers to measure creative work environment. Conventional wisdom holds that creativity is difficult if not impossible to assess, and that existing measures are marked by low levels of reliability and validity.