Creativity’s Return on Investment

Return on investment, or ROI, is a standard yardstick for measuring the effectiveness, and efficient use, of your resources. “What do we get back for every dollar we put in?” is a typical way of knowing if you are getting your money’s worth. When your inputs are physical in nature, it’s not that tough to figure out; you know how much the materials cost you, you know how much you are paying the people who turn them into a product, and you can determine the value of the product pretty easily to know if your inputs are being used wisely.

But…

…what if a critical input is creativity?

How do you measure the amount of creativity that goes into a product? How would you put a monetary value on it? You can know the amount you make off of a product, but how do you value the inputs that went into it?

In particular, consider how you measure the ROI on the resources you spend to develop your creative team. Your employees produce a product, but how much of their ability comes from natural talent, and how much is the result of training and development? With traditional production workers, you can value their initial training in terms of what they are now able to do: before the training they could not operate the machinery needed to produce products, but now they can. If you introduce new production techniques, you can know the cost of the training and also know what kind of improvement you get in production, and use the latter to measure the value of the training. But how do you know if the cost of developing creativity is worth the benefit you’re getting? We talk a lot about the importance of professional development, not only to improve the work your employees do for you but also as a retention tool, but how do you know if you’re doing it in the best way?

When it comes to creativity, measuring the amount of the input is hard, and measuring its value is equally challenging. Given that, how do you measure the return on your investment in Creatives?

I’m open to ideas.