How do you measure creativity? It’s a valid question, and one that a lot of people probably wish they could get an accurate fix on.
There’s a company in San Francisco, SparcIt, that claims to be able to measure and improve creativity. And they recently launched their creativity assessment training platform designed specifically for businesses.
According to SparcIt, this new tool legitimately enables companies to assess and improve the creativity of their employees.
“Creativity is an essential tool to growing companies and individuals,” says Farzad Eskafi, cofounder and CEO of SparcIt. “Previously, creativity training was only available to leaders at major companies in an ad hoc manner by costly consultants. We’re using technology to take these same assessment tools and learning techniques, and making them available to the masses – at fraction of the cost.”
The new creativity assessment trainer platform provides consultants, experts, and workshop facilitators the ability to quickly assess the semantic creativity of individuals, students or employees. As the first platform to train employees and company leaders, it offers several key features to improve their creativity:
- Real-Time Analytics: Detailed analytics and reporting are provided on key indices, including fluency, flexibility and originality.
- Task-Oriented Exercises: No survey-type questions are asked. Rather the platform uses all task-oriented and open-ended exercises such as mind-mapping, object-usage, scenario resolution, mini-saga, and story differentiation.
- Immediate Reporting: Users receive detailed graphs and analysis of their scores and how they’ve performed, providing increased results in speed, affordability, and accuracy.
SparcIt’s patent-pending algorithm incorporates a semantic-based psychometric approach that was created in partnership with Buffalo State University. As Eskafi assures us, it’s a well known approach that’s used by the scientific community to assess and develop creativity.
For example, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is a basic, commonly used creative assessment used by several Fortune 500 companies using the same approach as SparcIt. To date the team says they’ve had their technology validated by 25,000 beta testers including IO psychologists.
It does beg one, deeply philosophical question though: is putting a label on creativity antithetical to the meaning of creativity? Eskafi and his team are, one way or another, confident in their answer that it’s a good thing.
Image Credit: Flickr/ Opensource.com
