Why measuring individual innovativeness is so difficult: a critical review of standard methods and new ideas to measure innovativeness

Abstract

Innovative people are desperately wanted in nowadays world, wherefore tools to measure individual innovativeness are needed. This work reviews the commonly used metrics to gauge innovativeness, such as the Individual Innovativeness Scale (IIS). Hereby, it demonstrates via a survey that often a simple self-evaluation question contains the same information as conventional psychological surveys. As an alternative, another survey investigates whether bibliographical information can predict innovativeness. Finally, a new type of experiments to measure innovativeness is proposed, enabled by recent progress in neuroscience, that will not rely on classical self-report questions but on empirical data on the candidate’s brain activity in response to external stimuli.

Keywords

• innovativeness
• IIS
• recruiting
• survey
• experimental innovation