The importance of innovation in organizational progress is a widely recognized and agreed on factor. As noted by West and Farr (1990), innovation is critical in gaining competitive advantage irrespective of whether the advantage is aimed at improving business processes and services or it is aimed at gaining entrance into new markets. However, organizations often find it difficult to innovate because this requires creativity and the ability to put those creative ideas into practice.

One of the challenges lies in that creativity as a concept, is hard to measure. Tests of creativity used in the past have commonly measured creativity by looking at problem solving which in essence goes against what creativity is.

Tests that have been more successful at this, have allowed for the generation of ideas and images rather than relying on problem solving as an indicator, have proven to be labour intensive and impractical for online administration.

cut-es’ extensive research into what works in measuring creativity in online assessments has resulted in the development of a creativity measure called sparks. Sparks is the first creativity measure capable of assessing this construct online in a valid, reliable and practical way. In sparks, the test taker’s task is to produce a number of images using different shapes and objects and then give these images specific titles.

To check that the image titles are in line with the created image, sparks uses artificial intelligence components that interface with Google to count the hits that individual words and word combinations deliver, an evaluation equivalent to that of an experienced expert. This same technology makes the test results available instantly.

As businesses look to identify those with potential to be creative and to innovate in their initial online selection processes, cut-e provides a new cutting edge solution to do this swiftly and validly through sparks.