Assessing creativity of design projects: Criteria for the service engineering field

Abstract

An emerging thread of research is represented by the attempt of quantitatively assessing creativity, its dimensions, and how it influences the design process. The purpose of the task is to compare design options, thus allowing to select the most innovative and supposedly profitable alternative. The endeavor of previous works has consisted in the assessment of creativity concerning designers, methodologies, concepts, and products. As the scope of engineering design is expanding so to include not traditional aspects of the product development process, the paper proposes metrics tailored to evaluate the creativity of services. Such metrics are built as a result of the extension and adaptation of previously formulated criteria, including the evaluation of novelty and usefulness. A sample of successful innovative services is considered, giving rise to a considerable variability of creativity scores. The outcomes may represent a starting point for a wider discussion about which dimensions of creativity majorly impact the success of products and services in the marketplace.