Assessment of product engineering creativity

Abstract

One important element of a company’s capability to innovate is the creativity of each individual employee - especially in the context of product engineering. Employee recruitment or promotion to improve the creativity of one’s workforce needs assessment of individual creativity. This paper proposes a human resource assessment methodology suitable to assess creative ability of product engineers on an individual level. This methodology is composed of pre-existing instruments to measure prerequisites (including cognitive abilities, expertise, personality and motivation), and outputs of general creativity. The specifics of product engineering creativity and recruitment or promotion decisions are taken into account. © 2009 The Authors.