Ideaflow is the single most important creative metric

ideas / time = ideaflow

The most useful measure of creativity we’ve found is as follows: the number of novel ideas a person or group can generate around a given problem in a given amount of time. We call this metric ideaflow. An organization with low ideaflow is in trouble because it’s running out of an essential resource.[1]

As a metric, ideaflow is a simple gauge of the relative health of your creative engine or that of a team. The only value in measuring it lies in comparing your current score to previous and future ones. It looks like this: ideas / time = ideaflow[2]


#innovation-creativity

see also:


  1. Ideaflow – Utley and Klebahn (2022), ch. 1, § “Every Problem is an Idea Problem” ↩︎

  2. Ideaflow – Utley and Klebahn (2022), ch. 1, § “Measuring Ideaflow” ↩︎